Browsing the internet today, looking at various tumblr, wordpress and blogger sites I was struck by the imagery presented by my peers. Everywhere I looked I saw people wearing graphic tees with old bands or TV personalities on them, vintage shoes and 50s-90s reminiscent hairstyles, while eating the favorite childhood cereals and candies, in bedrooms coated in posters of the icons of their youth. That’s when it began to sink in… we have become an entire generation created by the media—a throwback generation.
There is an obsession with remembering and recreating what used to be popular. Just about everywhere you look now you can find the vintage, or throwback, version of almost anything. From Captain Crunch in its original-style packaging to throwback team jerseys to toys modeled after the version your parents knew. We are enamored of the past.
After coming to this conclusion I had to ask myself how this phenomenon came to be and what it means for our future.
Because of our great advancements in technology providing us with the ability to record everything that happens and capture moments in time with amazing clarity, we have given ourselves a window—make that a door—to the past that we cannot seem to resist walking through every chance we get.
So if everything we consume becomes some incarnation of what once was, will we cease to progress? Will each successive generation simply become a stunted version of the one prior?
If the 50s had men in skinny ties smoking luckies and housewives serving up cocktails on a silver platter, and the 60s had long unruly hair atop the heads of the peace-loving masses, and the 70s had discotheques filled with sex and drugs, and the 80s discovered hairspray and shoulder pads and cheesy TV, and the 90s had high-waist jeans and grunge and rebellion…
Then what do the 2000s have? All of that and a bag of chips. A regurgitated, self-obsessed, remember-when nightmare. The hipster look and way of life has become so trendy that it is the quintessential 2000s identity.
The latest generation of young adults is the result of being raised during a time when media began to rule the world. Throughout childhood and adolescence we were flooded with imagery and learned to be the ideal consumers. In fact, we became so good at consuming that we don’t know how to stop. Our lives are now built around the over-consumption of ideas. Ads, movies, television shows and music are everything we hear and see from the time we wake to the time we fall asleep, and a large portion of it has now been put on ‘repeat’ with the media of our past coming back to haunt us. We have thrown-up or memories and are now trying to force them down again while pretending it’s somehow something new.
It’s become popular to wrap your identity around who were where when you were a child. And it’s equally cool to claim ownership of the identity of who your parents and grandparents were. So when does nostalgia-based evolution become devolution? Who can we become when we only want to be who we were?
Let me venture a guess:
At some point we will tire of this trend and the drive to create new ideas will propel us forward. We are naturally curious beings and once the novelty of the throwback wears off we will return to the drawing table.
At least I hope.
