Tuesday, 04 October 2011 04:03

Feature: Rise of the Nineties

Written by  Hannah Lathan, Malia Griggs, Sarah Kobos
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Feature: Rise of the Nineties
I like what I’m seeing around campus this year: rollerblading in front of Russell, boys in neon windbreakers and girls with floral tights and scrunchies. On TV, there are reminders of childhood with the re-airing of classics including “Doug,” “Kenan and Kel” and “Clarissa Explains It All.” Facebook groups with names like “The ’90s Are All That” have hundreds of thousands of followers, and #MarkMcGwire and #BFFnecklaces are trending on Twitter. The 1990s are back in a big way, both in popular culture and at USC. With the graduation of the class of 2012, the last of the ’80s babies will move on, and this new generation of children born in the ’90s will officially rule the school (and, very soon, the world). These are what adults call “the best years of your life,” and given the breadth of technology and social networking at the ’90s generation’s disposal, it’s hard to argue this sentiment. And yet—what is it about Bel-Air, snapback caps and dreams of orange soda that inspire the students of tomorrow to turn to the past?


I was born at the end of 1989 and just made the ’80s cut-off. I’ve always thought, Thank God. I felt like I earned some sort of medal of coolness for being born into a time where people still learned cursive. And, hey, I did basically live through Hurricane Hugo. Our lives are defined by the decade into which we were born, and even if they only miss the ’80s/’90s divide by months, the children born in the ’90s often receive a negative rap from older generations.
Visual communications professor Scott Farrand has taught at the university for over 10 years and says that this is the first year as an instructor that every student in his class owns a computer. He notes the difference in attitude toward technology that he has seen in his classes during the past decade.
“The ’80s kids wanted to have more and more technology,” he says. “The ’90s people added that you had to have it. And then students became spoiled a lot.”
When I hear my ’80s friends discussing my classmates of the ’90s, they describe squeamish, Twitter-talking kids swimming in an overload of iEverything. It seems ridiculous to the ’80s kids that these tech-savvy millennials can claim nostalgia over pogs and The Oregon Trail when their memories are built around Internet memes.
Lauren Koch, a fourth-year theater student born in 1990, weighs in on this stigma.
“My boyfriend was born in the late ’80s, and when we discuss things like TV shows from the ’90s, he’ll say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You were still an infant.’ And I’m thinking, You’re all of—what? Two years older than me?” she says.
She maintains that she has every right to her longing for the 1990s.
“I do have nostalgia for a time when not everyone had so much technology,” she says. “People expect you to respond to things immediately, and if you don’t, they have the right to get mad at you about it. It’s not healthy to be on call all the time—to have more meaningless conversations.”
In actuality, these students of the early 1990s are not the millennial babies. They fall somewhere in between a generation of paper books and a generation of Kindles, and their childhoods are the last remaining still somewhat untouched by technology. They are what Farrand terms the “adaptors.”
“The decades before the adaptors weren’t exposed to technology early. They don’t understand some of it, and a lot of them don’t want to,” he says. “Those born after the adaptors have it so that they’re just expecting life to always be this way. But these students came up when technology was in its infancy, so they were constantly adapting.”
I spoke with a group of students born in the 1990s to determine their take on their “adaptor” status—and what it means for them when they reflect on their childhoods.
Paulina Olivares, a fourth-year visual communications student born in 1991, remembers the ’90s as the optimistic precursor to a decade marked by 9/11 and the downturn of the economy.
“There was promise,” she says. “The age of the Internet was just starting, and anybody could get a piece of the pie.”
Her nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood is embedded in nostalgia for the simplicity of life uncomplicated by ever-changing technology—and for the sense of wonder that she associates with the beginning of the tech boom.
“When I was little, I remember thinking that in the distant future, you’d be able to call someone on the phone and see his face. People do that on iPhones now, and it’s freaky that you can have this conversation through space and time,” Paulina says.
She misses the days when she wasn’t so concerned with the “what’s next?” question demanded after technological advances.
“We were the last generation to have a childhood in the traditional sense,” she says. “Now, a 9-year-old who asks questions can find out anything by turning to Google. Information is disposable.” The students of the ’90s are plugged in, but unlike the real millennials, they are still conscious of their dependence on devices and social networks.
Candler Matthews, a first-year exercise science student born in 1992, observes the disconnecting effects of technology on interactions between his friends still in high school.
“Two of them are dating,” he says, “and they text up until when she gets there to hang out with him, and then when they’re actually together, they hardly talk. They’ve already said it all.”
He worries he, too, will lose sight of his life before gadgets.
“Sometimes, somebody calls, and I just cut my phone off and cut my music off and think about what I want to think about,” he says. “I try and focus.”
These students recognize that they are locked into a grid of never-ending Facebook facelifts and iPhone upgrades, for better or worse.
“We didn’t grow up watching ‘Teen Mom’ or typing on iPads, so I feel like I’m half-nostalgic and half-thankful that we grew up when we did because we got the best of both worlds,” Hayley Towle, a second-year fashion merchandising student born in 1991, says.
Paulina accredits this resurgence of ’90s culture to a societal scrambling to rediscover innocence.
“Shows like ‘The Rugrats,’ ‘The Adventures of Pete and Pete’ and ‘Family Matters’ were all about exploration, shenanigans and values,” she says. “It was a time of no worries. I want it back.”
Who knows? As long as they retain an awareness of their beginning—an enchantment, even—these ’90s “adaptors” may be poised for all that.
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