I understand not every decade was a clean break, but each decade has fairly distinct defining properties. It feels like most of the 21st century has been a single run on with smaller changes. I know sometimes the definitions don’t come into focus until later, but I’ve been around since the 80s and I can distinctly remember the changes between the 80s, 90s and 00s as they were happening.

  • JackBinimbul@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    341·
    22 hours ago

    Tons of reasons.

    1. You lived through them. There is a continuity in your mind, rather than a dissociated aesthetic.
    2. Survivorship bias takes time. We think of bell bottoms for the 60’s, even though there were many other pant styles. Over time, specific things become iconic of an era.
    3. The internet and mass media flattened and accelerated trends.
    • Soulcreator@programming.dev
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Personally speaking I also lived through the 80’s and the 90’s but if you were to ask me to pick out the differences between the aesthetics from two photographs one from 2007 and one from 2017 I’d be hard pressed. If the images were taken on a consumer grade camera I’d probably focus on the differences in image resolution, but other than that I’d probably be hard pressed.

      Now if you were to repeat the experiment with two images from 87 vs 97 oh yeah I’m confident I’d be able to figure out which decade things were from.

      What I’m getting at is I’m not sure how much living through the eras really blunts our ability to perceive the differences between decades. If anything when watching period pieces with actors pretending to be in the 80’s or 90’s I feel like I’m acutely aware of the subtle tells that give away this wasn’t actually filmed in the past.

    • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
      11·
      22 hours ago

      Also the idea that after The Millennium, we instead focused on categorizing generations more. Which changed how each generations experienced the decades, making them less homogeneous.

      I’ve started calling this the 20s every chance I get.