#btw don't friend your boss on facebook that's a huge red flag

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I'm a younger millennial and I still get this. We're in the 2020s and I'm still thinking of the 80s as being twenty years ago, which hasn't been true since I was like five.

There's a radio station I listened to for much of the 2010s that used the tagline "80s, 90s and today!" A couple years ago they changed that to "80s, 90s, 2k and today!", which gave me a slight existential crisis.

I have a sense that pop culture for people older than me is this limited set of cultural references that everyone is expected to be at least somewhat familiar with, whereas for people younger than me, what you're into depends on what you find on the internet and what other people in your network (at school or on social media) are into. There's just so much out there.

It's really interesting for me to listen to my parents and their peers (older genX and young boomers) talking about media because they process it completely differently from me. To them, I'm a lightning-fast memester who's into all sorts of weird esoteric forms of media. When I compare myself to people in their teens now, though, I'm a "boomer" who's out of touch enough that I've never been on snapchat, tiktok, amino, or wattpad. (I'm not even sure which of those are relevant anymore, or to whom. I was a facebook/twitter/blogspot/tumblr/ao3 early adopter and then I stuck there, and part of me still thinks those sites and web 2.0 as a concept are the cool new thing.)

The point about media being longer-lasting now is really interesting to me because I was barely around for that era; I grew up as cassette and VHS tapes evolved into CDs and DVDs and then mp3s and Netflix. Early meme culture also had much more longevity. For me, the medium was fleeting, but the content and the cultural milieu were immutable.

Nowadays though, memes grow stale within a couple weeks and lolcats and advice animals are considered "ancient." New shows, games, and sometimes even books have a hype train for a couple of years and then the fandoms die off. Sometimes they violently self-destruct (see Voltron, which btw I still think of as a new show), sometimes they fade into obscurity as the hype train gets bored and finds new targets (why is everyone saying Among Us is dead?! It just got popular!). There are so many "classics" piling up that their value is starting to feel less canonical and more arbitrary. And why watch dated "classics" when there's so much new stuff coming out every year?

I think Harry Potter is an interesting transitional case that shows the changing trends of young people's attitudes towards media and the shape of fandom culture. For millennials, especially the ones a couple years older than me, the Harry Potter franchise was one of the biggest landmarks in pop culture. A lot of the internet's fandom infrastructure as it exists today was built by the Harry Potter fandom (building on foundations laid by pre-internet fan culture from fandoms like Star Trek, and followed up I think by the likes of Twilight, Naruto, the Hunger Games, and Supernatural).

The experience of the Harry Potter fans of my generation was of a hype train that lasted over a decade as the books and movies came out. If you were in fandom spaces on the internet or nerdy spaces irl there was no escaping it, even as the hype train was cooling down after 2011 when the last movie came out. (I only got into Harry Potter fanfiction in 2012 or so and it was still basically a thriving literary genre unto itself at that point.)

In the last year or two, the only things I've heard about Harry Potter are a few people (older than me) reminiscing about it, a few people enthusing about their own Hogwarts house, and a lot of hate directed at the entire franchise and even the fandom based on J.K. Rowling's transphobia and other bigotries. I can't really tell if that's widespread or just what's trickling in through my own connections. Potterheads have always been seen as "cringe," but these days it's more like "cancelled." (And the meaning of "cancelled" itself is a lot different than it was ten years ago. That's a whole other can of worms.)

The Harry Potter fandom of my generation grew up, diversified their interests, and don't participate as much in the fandom spaces of the current "young fan" demographic. There seems to be a weird gap where some pockets of the Harry Potter internet fandom of yesteryear still persist and yet other large swathes of the fandom scene kind of put the entire franchise on par with Voltron or Game of Thrones; old hype, yuck in hindsight. (Supernatural is kind of in a similar place, but way less mainstream popular.) Meanwhile in real life London the Platform 9 3/4 store and other Harry-Potter-themed tourist traps were still packed to the gills in 2019. (Will they even be there after the pandemic?)

When I say fandoms die off, I fudge the truth a bit. They're kind of undead. People say they're dead because there's still this current of public attention, the successor of the pop culture pools of previous decades. Things cycle constantly in and out of obscurity. People keep getting into the media industries and doing reboots and sequels to the touchstones of their own childhoods, and in doing so they spawn fandom revivals and grand dramas when old and new fandom cultures clash.

Kids these days think of internet fandom spaces as belonging to them and are often offended or at least surprised by all us old people hanging around (and apparently mid-twenties is old and I'm as almost as much of a boomer as my dad is). Meanwhile the millennials are like "excuse me? *We* were the internet generation! This has been our playhouse since before you were born!" (Wait, there are teenagers who were born in 2008 now?!) There's this crazy time dilation where each year exposes us to the same amount of new information and cultural moments that we used to see in maybe an entire decade. Meanwhile in real life... my parents are still probably thinking of Harry Potter as a new thing, the same way I still think of the Star Wars sequel trilogy as a new thing. My grandparents probably feel like Harry Potter came out last week.

What confuses things even more is that the lines between the internet and "real life" are dissolving. It used to take months for mainstream media to catch on that a major internet trend was happening, if they even did at all. I'm talking less than a decade ago. That's not that much of a long time if you're an adult!

Nowadays, fandom has gone mainstream. Creators and media companies are swayed by the fans, and what we are exposed to, excited about, and having discourse over is ever-increasingly manipulated by corporate powers. And in the world beyond that, half the people on the internet are using their real names, your shitty boss wants to friend you on Facebook, and you can't swing a bat on your own Twitter timeline without hitting a U.S. senator.

The pandemic was the last straw. The cultural impact of work, school, and social interaction shifting largely online for so many people, even if only for a few months, is beyond my ability to quantify. It's changing the internet, it's changing "real life" social norms for every age group, it's affecting today's kids in ways that even we millennials, the so-called "first generation to grow up online," won't be able to predict. It kind of feels like a dam has broken, sending a wave of long-expected changes across the landscape in an unexpectedly sudden flood.

The pace of cultural evolution, conversation and the cycle of creation and deconstruction and reconstruction is faster than ever before. I feel like an old man on this website. Heck, I bet even the teenagers feel old at this point, with all the things they've seen and been through in the last few years. It's nuts.

The funny thing is, we're all in the same boat. I have bonding moments with my grandma talking over this stuff. It's scary, it's exciting, it's interesting, it's stressful. Humanity is making things happen. There are more of us, we're getting more connected on a global scale, and we're making more things happen faster.

A lot of it is bad, a lot of it is good. I see so many people being pessimistic about where the world is going, and more so the older they are. We have more access to bad news than ever before. Our brains are hardwired to pay attention to that. On top of that, all this change is difficult and scary. But behind all that, good things are happening that weren't possible even in 2000.

In this last few years, I'm seeing a kind of grassroots trend in media shifting from grimdark to hopepunk, from cyberpunk to solarpunk. Amidst all the news of climate crisis, surveillance states and big tech monopolization, that's very encouraging. I hope we stay on that track.

Turns out, 2000 was 20 years ago. Which is odd, since 1980 was also.