A friend and I were having a conversation today about the nature of cultural upheaval in the U.S., and my friend pointed to the apparent calm of our own time.
We do not, on the surface, seem to be in an era of radical cultural change. Discourse today has nothing equivalent in urgency to hippies rejecting the Eisenhower post-war culture, or to punks declaring war on the middle class.
In fact, retro is in. Young people are mining the past for cultural influence, reaching back to the 1960s, or 1950s, or even the 1920s for inspiration.
But after talking it through a bit, we both concluded that this apparent calm is deceptive. The very nature of the cultural conversation is changing. The entire apparatus of passive consumer culture is being questioned by a generation less interested in pure consumption than in remix and collage.
For a growing number of young people, TV and movies are no longer the be-all and end-all of cultural experience. They’re just source material.
Maybe, my friend said, things seem calm because the new generation is still in the process of absorbing the past, assimilating it, gathering data.
As this generation grows into its power, and starts letting loose with a new kind of cultural production, one that is far more participatory than anything seen before, the change is going to be radical indeed.