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cosmolinguistThere seems to have been some kind of Internet memo I missed (thank god; I have after all been trying to spend less time in front of the computer, especially after realizing how much more time I had that week I deleted all my Google Reader feeds... of course some of them are back now, but a) not as many and b) I’m more cavalier about ignoring some stuff that turns up there).
Anyway, it seems in the last couple of days my little corner of the internet has been trying to send me a message, and that message is that this decade just finishing is going to be called The Noughties.
I do not approve.
i first saw it in, oddly enough, my Google Reader because Andrew shares things from a blog called The Noughties Were Shit, which is the usage of this word I am most likely to forgive because a) it talks about the decade in the past tense already, which I find inexplicably comforting and endearing and b) as the title suggests, it’s cynical and vitriolic about pretty much everything under discussion. (I do rather wish this included the flaccid nomenclature as well, which is delightfully meta -- calling the noughties the noughties is shit! -- but find no mention of this).
And that was fine, because it was a one-off thing. But later that same day I saw it somewhere else on another blog, and then on a horrible MTV recap-of-the-decade type show (don’t look at me, I didn’t have the remote... I don’t even have the TV). The latter especially strengthened my suspicions that, as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close*, the weight of commercialized tackiness will force people into creating not just the usual year-end retrospectives but bigger decade-end retrospectives.
I’m sure we just did this, but 1999 is longer ago than I thought and the world has moved on to bigger and better problems. Like, while those retrospectives were clearly Of The 90s, we’re not sure what it is we’re talking about here.
And admittedly after a short burst of ridiculous suggestions about this time ten years ago (the Aughties? the Naughties? the Zeros?), it seems everybody gave up on this because we had better things to worry about. Then Dubya stole his first election and this sort of thing quickly paled in comparison.
But now he’s gone, finally, and there are music videos to be ranked, people. And films and music and comics and and and... The potential for commercial exploitation is the only thing that seems sufficient to spurn anyone on to choosing an epithet for this quickly-ending decade, I get that. I do just wish they’d chosen something better than the Noughties, you know?
In my more grumpy moods, I prefer Nowties. (Nowt being, for those who don’t know, northern-English for “nothing.”)
And hereby I conclude my application for Youngest Curmudgeon Ever. I know I’m only 27 (but only for a couple more weeks!) but...
...I can’t help seeing this as the decade where I learned of the joys of ethernet and the internet started to steal my soul. Where I began to feel out of place for first not having a mobile phone, and since I got one in 2004 for not having one that gives me directions, orders my takeaways, lets me play games, takes pictures, plays music, and pretty much ensures (with Morrissettean irony) that I never have to interact with another human being ever again). This is the decade nostalgia reinvented itself as the toys from my childhood started making a comeback and I realized with horror that this is because people my age are now having kids. Though why that means they’d want to buy them Strawberry Shortcake dolls I don’t know, but then maybe I’m biased; I was always much more Lego than Strawberry Shortcake. This is the decade of fanfic and “reality shows” and voting people on or off the TV, the notion that people should get to participate in all their entertainment somehow dumbing us all down rather than lifting us up above the level of indolently passive consumption as it sounds like it might have. It’s the decade of blogs and vlogs and moblogs and comments, endless comments. Post anything on the internet and there’ll be someone along in a minute to tell you it’s all the fault of Muslim extremists or to try to sell you something to enlarge your penis. It’s the decade of spam, of information being if not free then extremely cheap and extremely widespread, edging towards both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer. And thus we find that talk is cheap and maybe that you get what you pay for, too. Bruce Springsteen’s song with the chorus that goes “Fifty-seven channels and nothing on” must sound positively quaint by now; now we’ve got hundreds of channels and nothing on. That’s progress. A bunch of them are in HD now and everything. I can’t blame Charlie Brooker for wanting to go on a culture diet. Why do you think I have no TV? And of course that only means that no I haven’t seen Lost or Life on Mars or Heroes or Firefly or The Wire or Dollhouse or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to be watching now. And you know what? I don’t mind. Of course I don’t mind people who do care about those things either (the only reason I can rattle off these names is that I’ve heard about them from people I care about), but goddam it, I’ve had enough.
* Unless you are a pedant like me, one of those annoying bastards seething as everyone else welcomed the dawn of the new millennium around the time they were worrying about the Y2K bug because we knew the new millennium wouldn’t start until the next year... and that Y2K didn’t sound like anything to worry about. And hey, we were right about Y2K too, weren’t we? Well then.
Anyway, it seems in the last couple of days my little corner of the internet has been trying to send me a message, and that message is that this decade just finishing is going to be called The Noughties.
I do not approve.
i first saw it in, oddly enough, my Google Reader because Andrew shares things from a blog called The Noughties Were Shit, which is the usage of this word I am most likely to forgive because a) it talks about the decade in the past tense already, which I find inexplicably comforting and endearing and b) as the title suggests, it’s cynical and vitriolic about pretty much everything under discussion. (I do rather wish this included the flaccid nomenclature as well, which is delightfully meta -- calling the noughties the noughties is shit! -- but find no mention of this).
And that was fine, because it was a one-off thing. But later that same day I saw it somewhere else on another blog, and then on a horrible MTV recap-of-the-decade type show (don’t look at me, I didn’t have the remote... I don’t even have the TV). The latter especially strengthened my suspicions that, as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close*, the weight of commercialized tackiness will force people into creating not just the usual year-end retrospectives but bigger decade-end retrospectives.
I’m sure we just did this, but 1999 is longer ago than I thought and the world has moved on to bigger and better problems. Like, while those retrospectives were clearly Of The 90s, we’re not sure what it is we’re talking about here.
And admittedly after a short burst of ridiculous suggestions about this time ten years ago (the Aughties? the Naughties? the Zeros?), it seems everybody gave up on this because we had better things to worry about. Then Dubya stole his first election and this sort of thing quickly paled in comparison.
But now he’s gone, finally, and there are music videos to be ranked, people. And films and music and comics and and and... The potential for commercial exploitation is the only thing that seems sufficient to spurn anyone on to choosing an epithet for this quickly-ending decade, I get that. I do just wish they’d chosen something better than the Noughties, you know?
In my more grumpy moods, I prefer Nowties. (Nowt being, for those who don’t know, northern-English for “nothing.”)
And hereby I conclude my application for Youngest Curmudgeon Ever. I know I’m only 27 (but only for a couple more weeks!) but...
...I can’t help seeing this as the decade where I learned of the joys of ethernet and the internet started to steal my soul. Where I began to feel out of place for first not having a mobile phone, and since I got one in 2004 for not having one that gives me directions, orders my takeaways, lets me play games, takes pictures, plays music, and pretty much ensures (with Morrissettean irony) that I never have to interact with another human being ever again). This is the decade nostalgia reinvented itself as the toys from my childhood started making a comeback and I realized with horror that this is because people my age are now having kids. Though why that means they’d want to buy them Strawberry Shortcake dolls I don’t know, but then maybe I’m biased; I was always much more Lego than Strawberry Shortcake. This is the decade of fanfic and “reality shows” and voting people on or off the TV, the notion that people should get to participate in all their entertainment somehow dumbing us all down rather than lifting us up above the level of indolently passive consumption as it sounds like it might have. It’s the decade of blogs and vlogs and moblogs and comments, endless comments. Post anything on the internet and there’ll be someone along in a minute to tell you it’s all the fault of Muslim extremists or to try to sell you something to enlarge your penis. It’s the decade of spam, of information being if not free then extremely cheap and extremely widespread, edging towards both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer. And thus we find that talk is cheap and maybe that you get what you pay for, too. Bruce Springsteen’s song with the chorus that goes “Fifty-seven channels and nothing on” must sound positively quaint by now; now we’ve got hundreds of channels and nothing on. That’s progress. A bunch of them are in HD now and everything. I can’t blame Charlie Brooker for wanting to go on a culture diet. Why do you think I have no TV? And of course that only means that no I haven’t seen Lost or Life on Mars or Heroes or Firefly or The Wire or Dollhouse or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to be watching now. And you know what? I don’t mind. Of course I don’t mind people who do care about those things either (the only reason I can rattle off these names is that I’ve heard about them from people I care about), but goddam it, I’ve had enough.
* Unless you are a pedant like me, one of those annoying bastards seething as everyone else welcomed the dawn of the new millennium around the time they were worrying about the Y2K bug because we knew the new millennium wouldn’t start until the next year... and that Y2K didn’t sound like anything to worry about. And hey, we were right about Y2K too, weren’t we? Well then.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-03 06:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-03 06:15 pm (UTC)I rather like that it's "fifty-seven" specifically. It avoids the perils of hyperbole, which desensitizes people to the actual magnitude of some things because you're so used to hearing that a dress is awesome that when you look up at the night sky and think about the universe, the word "awesome" seems out of place. Or when people talk about being "literally embarrassed to death" or whatever, after a while that kind of thing slides in one ear and out the other, and I think this is why "fifty thousand channels" has less impact on me, as a concept, than "fifty-seven." Even though that's, like I said, rather dated now.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-03 07:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-03 08:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-03 07:41 pm (UTC)I've started noticing end-of-a-decade programmes and lists and it's come as a slight surprise to realise it's just about to happen. I remember being more excited by the end of the nineties and feel like more things happened during that decade. I'm not sure if it's that "the Internets ate my life" or whether I changed so much during the 90s (aged 10-20) and changes have been subtler during this decade (20-30).
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-03 08:29 pm (UTC)I wonder if the nondescript nature of this decade is more to do with the wider culture. Thanks to the internet, among other things, there has stopped being less of a definitive epoch in music, events, attitudes, etc. that changes every few years or so, and more of a splintering where every conceivable niche is catered to and everything is in flux all the time because we have access to the practically-inexhaustible collection of information, opinions, ads and porn that we call the internet. This sort of thing can't help but be very different from the days when there were only two or three TV channels, which in turn is different from the time before nickelodeons or before radio dramas or whatever.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-03 09:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 12:39 pm (UTC)Shockwave Rider
Date: 2009-12-04 08:43 am (UTC)[ *classic? i'm thinking The Journal of Albion Moonlight and Nova Express ]
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 12:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-04 02:16 pm (UTC)the internet is wise.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 12:41 pm (UTC)