Society Never Escaped the Blandness of Generation X

At the time that the web was born, in the early 1990s, a popular trope was that a new generation of teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out exceptionally bland. The members of “Generation X” were characterized as blank and inert. The anthropologist Steve Barnett compared them to pattern exhaustion, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative.

[...]

Here is a claim I wish I weren’t making, and that I would prefer to be wrong about: popular music created in the industrialized world in the decade from the late 1990s to the late 2000s doesn’t have a distinct style—that is, one that would provide an identity for the young people who grew up with it. The process of the reinvention of life through music appears to have stopped.

Notes:

GenX was defined as not having a distinctive culture, but only rehashed previous cultures, but listening to music today, there is nothing new and distinctive. Our society has remained bland.

Folksonomies: culture art generations

Taxonomies:
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Entities:
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Concepts:
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Anthropology (0.881591): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
1990s (0.815850): dbpedia | freebase
Popular culture (0.793994): dbpedia | freebase | yago
2000s (0.782059): dbpedia | freebase
Humanities (0.770379): dbpedia | freebase
Generation X (0.730519): dbpedia | freebase
Sociology (0.708327): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc

 You Are Not A Gadget
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Lanier, Jaron (2010-01-28), You Are Not A Gadget, Penguin, Retrieved on 2012-01-03
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: