So, this “stuck culture” thing that people keep talking about. People’s notion of normal is deeply screwed up.
The baseline—what “culture” seems to be “stuck” by comparison with—is a rapid turnover of fashions made possible by wealth and mass media. Wealth to afford new stuff all the time, mass media to disseminate fashions quickly. In one of Thomas Hardy’s novels, I believe (though can’t recall which one) he observes that while London fashions turned over every year, his rural characters wore essentially the same clothes as their 16th-century ancestors. Many folk songs recorded in 1920s Appalachia had roots traceable to the Elizabethan era. Even the “Classical Era” of music lasted nearly a century. Before the 19th century, even for the relatively wealthy, fashion turned far more slowly; for the 99% it turned on a scale of centuries.
Then came mass production, of course. But also magazines, made possible by cheaper printing, and with them the need to continually think up new stuff to publish. New dress patterns. New recipes. New stories. New ideas. The wheel of fashion accelerated. The possibilities of music publishing and the mass manufacture of pianos brought a continual demand for new music to play, and an industry that stoked that demand. Then came records, and radio, movies, and television. Each new invention disseminated new ideas faster; each required a greater source of new ideas to disseminate. The wheel spun ever faster. So that now, we are surprised to find that everybody is wearing pretty much the same clothes and listening to more or less the same music as they were ten or twenty years ago.
But that sort of rapid cultural change—which we now think of as normal—is a product of particular dominant technologies. Technologies that both enabled rapid change <i>and required it</i>, in order to exist—which is to say, to continue to make money for the people that created them. All were, in their way, building blocks of what is now sometimes called the attention economy.
And now comes the internet, which enables more rapid change than anything previously imaginable. New ideas are disseminated around the world literally overnight. But the internet does not require anything really new to continue making money for the people who run it. It requires attention, just like magazines and 78-rpm records, and thus it requires ever more stuff, but there’s no longer an incentive for that stuff to be new. It couldn’t possibly be, at the rate we consume it. Unlike the technologies that came before it, the internet is its own archive, in which old and new are interchangeable. It’s like summer reruns: if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.
More important, absolutely anybody can disseminate their ideas. People with genuinely new ideas are less likely to be heard. Ordinary people do not actually have time to think up new stuff all the time! They are more worried about what they are going to eat for dinner. And—aha!—there you find an aspect of culture that actually has changed rapidly over the past few decades. What we eat for dinner in the United States is dramatically different than it was in 1990. In the age of magazines food fashion turned on a scale of decades; now it seems to move year to year.
What else? Personal fitness seems to have rapidly changing fads. The internet has fostered some revival of handcrafts, and the little world of hand-tool woodworking, for example, is now robust enough that it has its own fads and fashions. And there’s sex, of course. What you could justly call fashion in sex has turned over pretty rapidly the last few decades.
So the wheel is still turning, for areas of culture whose practice remains in the hands of ordinary internet-connected people. The sort of culture that’s foisted on us, meanwhile, may be slipping into stasis. Whether that’s actually a bad thing depends on what happens next. Ordinary people used to tell their own stories, sing their own songs, design their own clothes. The kind of rapid change the 20th century taught us to think of as normal was fueled by the rise of technologies that made the arts a top-down, for-profit venture. Boredom may at last spur us to learn, again, how to make our own culture. Or we may just diddle ourselves to death. I suspect it’s up to us.
In any case, (1) do try to learn some history before you start talking about the end of it, and (2) don’t cry out that it’s the end of the road just because your car ran out of gas. Get out and walk.