Ten Most Significant Cultural Trends of the Last Decade (Andy Crouch)

(via Pe scara Cerului)

 

Ten Most Significant Cultural Trends of the Last Decade

by Andy Crouch

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Ten years is a very short time. As I reflect on the world in 2011 compared to the world in 2001, I’m less struck by how much has changed than by how much is the same. Terror, war, new technology, economic boom and bust, surprising political triumphs followed by sudden changes of fortune—yup, sounds like the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, and 1960s to me. It’s almost axiomatic that any change big enough to shape an entire nation or society happens in long waves spanning generations, not a mere ten years.

Indeed, when I reflect on the most significant developments of the never-adequately-named 2000s (the aughts? the aughties? the naughties?), it seems that almost all of them were well under way in 1999, or even 1989. At the same time, in the last ten years some long-wave trends accelerated in notable ways. Acceleration matters. In one sense, walking, riding a horse, driving a car, and traveling by plane are simply variations on the millennia-old human theme of mobility, tracing back literally to the earliest signs of our restless race. But the difference between five miles an hour and 500 miles an hour is not just a quantitative matter of speed, but a qualitative change in the horizons of possibility.

Here are ten significant trends in North American culture that accelerated dramatically in the 2000s—almost always for better and for worse at the same time.

One | Connection (…)

Two | Place (…)

Three | Cities (…)

Four | The End of the Majority (…)

Five | Polarity (…)

Six | The Self Shot (…)

Seven | Pornography (…)

Eight | Informality (…)

Nine | Liquidity (…)

Ten | Complexity (…)

Whole article can be read HERE.

Well, some of my research  (10 Outlines for a Philosophy of the Quotidian) interfere with this cultural trends. In addition, I recommend a well-documented book, The Self-destruction of the West: critical cultural anthropology (Damien Francois, Editions Publibook, 2007).