Is Nostalgic Pop Culture Dead?
As we head into the Labor Day weekend, I thought I’d take a break from my musings on workplace morale, corporate entertainment and employee team building to look at the creative side of our trivia business, which relies at its heart on pop culture.
People the world over love pop culture, and follow it ravenously: TV shows, movies, celebrity gossip, music and fads. One of the things people enjoy most at our live pop culture trivia events in NYC and elsewhere is the nostalgia which naturally goes along with pop culture throughout history, as people fondly remember with a visceral emotional connection not only the answer to the question, but who they were back then: where they were in life, what they did, and how they felt. Put people in a group setting, and the warm nostalgia is only amplified as these memories feed off of one other.
Given the recent trends we see in media and technology, however, we might soon need to re-define the role of nostalgia in how we view pop culture. We now live in an on-demand world: no longer are viewers beholden to network broadcast schedules to view their favorite TV shows, nor do they even have to sit through commercials. Reality shows like “American Idol” allow for viewer interaction which alters the outcome of events in real-time, and the current generation of young people will grow up thinking that entertainment content is something you can call up whenever you like, is can be “voted” on in various ways, and you never have to suffer through anything you don’t want to.
Do you think, if given the option, today’s teenagers will actually watch a television rerun from when they were little kids, versus find something they can call up on demand? Do you think they even know what a rerun is?
I’m willing to bet that most Generation Y folks haven’t seen “Back to the Future” – double or nothing that when THEIR kids are teenagers, they won’t even have HEARD of it. Odds are, generations to come will have absolutely no connection whatsoever to any pop culture which came out before their birth.
I find this sad. After all, what does this say about us, and how we value the past? Our kids will never understand or appreciate the rich knowledge we all shared of what was playing on the radio (“what’s a radio?”), what programs were on before the ones we wanted to watch (“you mean you had to wait to watch it?”), which commercials made us laugh (“you WATCHED commercials?”) and what was on even before we were born, in the form of reruns (“the form of WHAT?”).
In a “now” world, the future of pop culture nostalgia may indeed be in peril. Then again, maybe it’s not such a bad thing- after all, lots of that stuff should probably be forgotten, anyway.
Enjoy your Labor Day holiday- see you next week!