Every post-war decade has it’s dominant or remarkable youth subculture: rock’n’roll in the fifties, hippies in the sixties, punkers in the seventies, yuppies in the eighties and nerds in the nineties and 2000’s.
Each subcultures was defined primarily by two things:
- Their novel ways of engaging with media ranging from music to open-source software, and in the process redefining media for their decade.
- Their puberty experience as a function of how rebellious they were towards society, their caretakers and parents.
Media seems to be defining for youth culture more than anything else, and the acceptance or rejection by adults of the novel media phenomena of the day seems to be directly correlated with the degree of rebellion experienced by all parties during puberty.
The rock’n’roll and hippie teens were expressing themselves through their musical preferences more than anything else. It just happened to be that their parents didn’t approve of their children’s taste in music, and by rejecting their media of choice they also rejected their children’s youth experience.
Punkers were very different. They also expressed themselves through their musical preferences but clothing, hairstyles and attitude were equally important. The punker “fuck you” attitude towards society at large was just as defining as owning bootleg tapes of The Clash concerts.
Yuppies were riding Toffler’s Third Wave: striking it rich on Wall Street or in the City of London, owning a Lamborghini Countach or dreaming about dating Cindy Crowford. This was what the media of the eighties had to offer, together with New Wave music that was all in all a non-event compared to the musical upheaval of the previous decades. Media in the eighties were much less exciting than before: consolidating the media freedoms gained in previous decades but not yet affected by the up and coming digital media. Puberty was already loosing its grip on media innovation.
The nineties and 2000’s completely changed our understanding of media. The nerdy youths certainly played their part but they no longer owned media innovation. Bearded baby boomers in California were now just as influential for media as teen culture was.
Youth rebellion against the society of their parents and grand-parents necessarily is a function of how much youth culture affects media innovation. In the fifties and sixties their influence in media was very high and their rebellion was strong. Today teen culture has been absorbed in the cultural diversity and abundance that marks this moment. In other words: teens don’t have to rebel because everybody is rebelling.
Today everybody is going through their puberty (again). And because everybody is in puberty nobody is in puberty. The physiological phenomena related to puberty are no longer driving cultural and media innovation.
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Actually Toffler’s Third Wave explains 80s, nineties, and 2000s all together. He predicted the increase of white collor workforce that tilted the balance in favor of knowledge workers fueled by transistor, personal computer would change everything that had to with relationships, culture, music, so forth. So we are stil riding the Third Wave as we speak. Toffler was incorrectly associated with Newt Gingrich, and therefore the Wall Street arm of the Republican party, but this association is wrong. Toffler’s idea of “prosuming”, that is, producing for your own consumption correctly predicted open source movement. His latest book Revolutionary Wealth is a tastement to that.
Hi Steven,
I started following your blog. Very interesting views and topics. We met at iMinds and we told each other that we would meet about my project (music and communities, remember?). Sorry to spam your blog comments a bit, but I didn’t find another way to contact you (except Twitter, but you didn’t respond there). Even if you don’t have any time or interest, please let me know.
Thanks,
Hilke (@colorlessgreen)