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Is being able to be easily summed up as a caricature for a theme party a sign of depth or shallowness?
But, in a point I believe I may have made in the other recent thread where we had this exact same discussion (apparently in deference to the fading memories of the elderly among us, we are putting conversations on a shorter repeat cycle), one essential component of the last 15 years that defines it while making it hard to define is that technological changes allowed for the complete fracturing of popular culture, which is what we all tend to use when it comes to the attaching shallow labels to an era (for example, to immediately set a movie in the late sixties a movie is going to play one of maybe a dozen songs).
Yes, everybody was different on the fringes but there were still only 3 TV networks so 100 million people watched the MASH conclusion and it was the same Top 40 nation wide so even if you were into something a little different you still couldn't help but consume it. Today's youth, though, I think will be way more fractured in the past without so many broad pop cultural reference points and that is itself very much a defining element of a new era. But it makes for an impossible theme party.
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