My take on the lack of decadeology in the 21st Century

In my response to Adam Conover's video, I contend that the change in vernacular was merely a symptom, not a cause, of something larger.

"I mean terms like 'aughts' and 'teens' not taking hold didn't help any. But there is a much larger phenomena at play here.

So similar to one of the points you made... In the 1990s, how many people did you know who were STILL all about disco culture? People still wearing butterfly collared suits and frequenting niche clubs that still played disco?

Now, in the 2010's, how many people did you know that were still just as goth, for instance, as they were in the 90's? I have tons of friends who are just as goth as when we were in college.

The reason decades have no distinct character are not because of language. It is because we no longer have shared experiences as a society (except for, as you pointed out, the really bad ones).

We no longer have shared experiences, for better or worse, because we don't have centralized media anymore. We no longer have those shared moments, such as everyone - left, right, urban rural - watching the Beatles for the first time together on the Ed Sullivan show. We went in and out of trends TOGETHER as a society. We all stood in line to see Star Wars together. This was only possible when there were only the big three TV networks, and Billboard and Casey Kasem were singular authorities on what was hot in music, for instance.

Remember that phrase "voice of a generation"? Usually came up with with musicians and actors that characterized youth culture at any given time. Often when some of them died early. Buddy Holly... James Dean... Jimmy Hendrix... Kurt Cobain was probably the last of these culturally-uniting figures. And to that point, the concept of generations was completely prevalent throughout the 20th Century and it interoperated alongside decadeology without any discord for... well... decades.

Since the birth of the Internet and the invention of the iPod.... and eventually Netflix... instead we each have our own playlists... we no longer come in and out of trends together... we each are grabbing onto one niche or another and staying there for as long as we feel like... so the music and fashion of any given micro-community never goes away. As new people leave, new people join. I go to a monthly house music party that has an age-range of attendants ranging from 20-70 years old..

Enter social media and now everything is shot to hell. You now can customize your own REALITY. We've lost any sense of a shared view of the world and our society. I'd even venture that we're now just disparate culturally nomadic tribes. And if these inventions had arrived 30 years earlier, I contend that the disco scene would have found a nice little corner, and there'd still be people doing the bump and the hustle regardless of what numbers were on the calendar."