globalization of monoculture
one of the people interviewed for the Helvetica movie mentions that he thinks that the democratization of design is going to end the concept of “eras”, concepts like 60s being the era of modernism, 70s were a backlash, 90s were the grunge, etc. the idea of designers as a closed culture, one that shares influences, and all know what the others are doing, is going to be made obsolete as millions of people start teaching themselves the processes, going into it with no knowledge of the past, and very willing to simply trial+error until they get something that appeals to them
i want agree and disagree. on one hand we do still see trends, things like the rounded corners of the first wave of web2.0, which implies that simple hivemindedness can duplicate the effects of single points of distribution and design monoculturalism. on the other hand, how long did that trend last? one, maybe two years? and what percentage of the world was affected? it seems relevant to me, but a disproportionate amount of my design exposure comes from websites. that whole fad was probably not even a blip in the actual design world
i talked about the same phenomenon showing up in audio and music culture. i’m not sure if it will be possible for a genre, a culture, to start and grow into an actual world phenomenon starting from now. there simply might be too many people speaking at the same time for anyone to be heard.
counter-example: dubstep. counter-counter-example: dubstep. yes it’s a genre that is clearly different and clearly new, but on the other hand it hasn’t grown a visual culture, it isn’t growing very quickly, and i don’t think it has lasting power in the sense that the things it came from (jungle, dub) have, did, and do.
not that it really matters much to the average person. we will have helvetica corporate brands and 4 person guitar rock on radio, and the average person will be perfectly ok with that, because really, why shouldn’t they. you can’t worry about every damn detail of your life 24/7.