It doesn't though. What percentage of people do you think made up the viewership of the top 20 movies in 1977 vs today? People's attention is spread much thinner over vastly more "content" than ever before. You can be a fan of 20 different things that your neighbor has never heard of; this was much more difficult 50 years ago. I don't think the top 20 means much anymore.
No, that's not exactly what it is. Culture hasn't always been this way, but people have.
Culture, especially pop culture and various other side ones, have constantly been changing. The 50s were not like the 60s were not like the 70s etc.
But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better."
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I wish I'd grown up today, I'd be far more likely to find friends with somewhat overlapping interests, and far less likely to get bullied for some of them.
>But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better."
I think the constant trap I see today is people perceiving different eras' output as "different but equal". A lot of this has to do with the populist notion that everything is about "taste" and nothing can be possibly better or worse.
But there are absolutely periods of better and worse art output, decades or whole periods of cultural stagnation, sometimes in all arts or other times just in some, periods of burst developments, etc. When we see art and music history at large, we easily discern them and have names for them - and history scholars have.
But when it comes to post '50s music, we can't fathom that some period is better than another, as if history is finished, and every decade is perpetually equally good.
The funny part is that we think that in the period with perhaps the most decline compared to the past.
That's probably the most facile cliche answer, amounting to "it has always been this way". TFA, for one, shows tons of ways it isn't so...
> TFA, for one, shows tons of ways it isn't so...
It doesn't though. What percentage of people do you think made up the viewership of the top 20 movies in 1977 vs today? People's attention is spread much thinner over vastly more "content" than ever before. You can be a fan of 20 different things that your neighbor has never heard of; this was much more difficult 50 years ago. I don't think the top 20 means much anymore.
No, that's not exactly what it is. Culture hasn't always been this way, but people have.
Culture, especially pop culture and various other side ones, have constantly been changing. The 50s were not like the 60s were not like the 70s etc.
But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better."
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I wish I'd grown up today, I'd be far more likely to find friends with somewhat overlapping interests, and far less likely to get bullied for some of them.
>But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better."
I think the constant trap I see today is people perceiving different eras' output as "different but equal". A lot of this has to do with the populist notion that everything is about "taste" and nothing can be possibly better or worse.
But there are absolutely periods of better and worse art output, decades or whole periods of cultural stagnation, sometimes in all arts or other times just in some, periods of burst developments, etc. When we see art and music history at large, we easily discern them and have names for them - and history scholars have.
But when it comes to post '50s music, we can't fathom that some period is better than another, as if history is finished, and every decade is perpetually equally good.
The funny part is that we think that in the period with perhaps the most decline compared to the past.
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