After church yesterday, I went to the museum with some of my friends from church. Apparently these friends go to the museum quite often.... I'm guessing because they're very cultured.
Anyways, one of the neat displays that I looked at was on the 1990s. It contained a lot of items from that time period.
It included the following:
- Alanis Morissette poster
- X-Files poster
- Discman with audio CDs
- Pokemon (curse those fluffy demons)
- Pogs
- Transformers featuring Optimus Prime
- Rio MP3 Player
- Reboot action figures featuring Hack and Slash, Hexidecimal, Megabyte, Enzo, and Bob
- Personal Computer
- Cellphone
I think other things they could have included are: Napster, Y2K, Tickle Me Elmo, Laser pointers, Magic The Gathering cards, Hip Hop Albums, and maybe things related to the Internet. It was the 90s where the Internet started becoming available to the masses.
That actually reminds me of a funny story. I think it was 1995, and I was one of the few people who had an e-mail account. I had this super long e-mail address from FidoNet (precursor to the Internet). It looked something like this: chan@freds.bbs.f2.n750.z6.fidonet.org. Easy to remember huh? So anyways, I was in high school, and I was using telnet to get at my e-mail from the school's computer lab. This girl comes by and sees me reading messages in this black and white console window, and she asks, what the heck is that? I reply, oh... this is e-mail, it's a way of communicating with people over a network. She replied, uhhh......okay, that's pretty useless, no one but you nerds are going to use it. Hmmm.... ironically, e-mail accounts are fairly ubiquitous now. Most people have a few e-mail accounts. I think I must have a dozen different e-mail accounts at least.
Anyways, it was fun travelling back in time.
This led me thinking though.... what are some things that embodies the 2000's. I can't think of too many things that are distinctly significant to this decade. That's pretty sad considering it's already 2005, and this decade hasn't developed a distinct flavour yet in my opinion (other than political things like terrorism).
Some of the things I thought of include: the infamous implosion of the dot com era, the proliferation of reality shows, the popularity of poker, the health craze that people are in, the rise of terrorism, and collaborative technologies such as blogs and wikis.
Other than that, I couldn't think of any toys that that are of this decade. Music wise, it seems like a lot of the bands from the late 90s have successfully migrated to the new decade. I can't think of any music styles that define this decade. Even fashion... not very distinctive. Although, this could be that I'm somewhat culturally detached being in acadamia for most of this decade so far. On the other hand, anything seems to go in fashion these days. Culturally we seem much more diverse in acceptable fashions, and we don't stress conformity. Maybe I'm also older and more mature, and realize I don't have to follow all these stupid trends like in high school? I'm also probably not aware of what kind of toys that kids play with these days either.
Can anyone think of anything to add to my list of 2000's inventions, culture, and fads? Anyone have some good memories of the 1990s culture they'd like to post?
