Internet hyperspeed produced a paradoxical cultural stasis
Evidence
Many feel we’ve entered into a period of cultural stasis. On the internet, time moves so fast that it doesn’t move at all. The transformation of idealistic hippies from the class of ’ into yuppie materialists fifteen years later provided the dramatic tension of the film The Big Chill; in 2022, culture from 2007 feels disappointingly familiar. Many bored with contemporary culture have fled into a “retromania” obsession with exhuming the past. Meanwhile, Gen Z appears to have abandoned previous generations’ determination toward radical artistic innovation for laid-back amateurism. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 31
Categorization
- QUESTION: The ‘culture from 2007 feels familiar’ and retromania observations as evidence of stasis deserve more rigorous backing than anecdote — worth checking later chapters.
- CANDY: The Big Chill contrast is a compact, conversation-ready way to show how fast culture used to turn over.
- XREF: connects to: Cultural stasis may be the historical norm, not the exception. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 798; The internet dismantled the mechanisms that once produced era-defining cultural trends — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 30; The internet’s promise of niche escape collapsed into a mass culture of short-form content — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 522 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- The internet’s promise of creative renaissance produced the opposite in the late 2010s
#corroborates(0.90) - The internet’s promise of niche escape collapsed into a mass culture of short-form content
#expands(0.88) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 522 - Algorithmic platforms cannot explain cultural stagnation because it predates them
#qualifies(0.85) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 19 - Event-spectacle media culture causes the postmodern collapse of time horizons
#expands(0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 394 - Early internet success no longer required techno-utopian ideals or DIY ethos
#expands(0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 173 - The internet has an enduring-ephemeral temporality where images are both fleeting and eternal
#qualifies(0.72)