What’s your favorite aspect of the 1990’s? Colin Cowherd of Fox Sports and The Volume posed this question to author Chuck Klosterman.
The two were discussing Klosterman’s latest book The Nineties and its ideas about media coverage of Michael Jordan’s stint in Minor League Baseball, Sosa and McGwire’s home run race, and eventually OJ Simpson.
The murder trial, nearly thirty years ago, took the American news media to the apex of the most sensationalist and titillating reporting. A full departure from the days of Walter Cronkite and Ben Bradlee.
Even more frightening, the trial coverage predated the emergence of social media.
In the nineties there were far less avenues to share your opinion and ideas with the world. You had to be ravenous for the spotlight and attention of television or writing.
Social media offers anyone the opportunity to share their face, voice, and words on their local taco shop, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, or SCOTUS overturning Roe V. Wade.
Most everyone, including yours truly, regularly takes up the mantle to yarl from the mountain top. Do we all participate simply because the means conveniently exist? Or has groupthink and herd unanimity homogenized?
Klosterman’s book and his answer to my and Cowherd’s questions concludes the nineties was the last decade before prominent social pressure to be involved with society.
It was understood to have your thoughts and keep them to yourself.
Chuck Klosterman
If you wanted to engage in public discourse obviously you could, but you didn’t have to. There was no expectation. To be completely alone and isolated with your own thoughts was fine.
It would have been odd to even ask a celebrity like Tom Hanks about the Anita Hill allegations in 1991 yet today Hanks would likely offer cogent thoughts about the public hearing.
An anonymous person, not just celebrities, likely have canned responses and reflexes prepared to avert public scrutiny and shaming. Everyone carefully minds their public avatar. Their brand.
Yes, again, yours truly as well. Just follow just check my instagram story. I pay to keep this blog alive despite reawakening my scribbling.
However, I find myself more content with my thoughts on my own terms rather than persuade, in essence control, the public narrative.
I wish I could just delete my Instagram but I have an abundance of excuse trap cards ready to counter any move. No cop-out I make physically prevents me from deleting the account. I delete the app from my phone periodically, but I just check my account on my laptop or redownload the app again.
Call it social engineering or my desire to share my views. I’m an addict but a self-aware addict establishing my own terms.
Always an opinionated boy, I grew up during the infancy of social media. 2006 was a far more innocent time puddling around on Gaia Online than reading Twitter comments today.
Gaia was a charming first place for me to discover digital connection. Sharing your thoughts back then online was still new, inspiring, and truly liberating, but those days are long gone.
Social pressure to be active in society exists, specifically on the internet. At the same time there’s a brudan of anxiety, humiliation, and sometimes even harm for participating.
CAUTION: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK (but you kinda have to)
The nineties was the last time one could be alone with their thoughts and not even imagine there were any consequences for it.
Photo by Pauline Loroy
Disaesthetic 