evenings.
The first decade of the 21st century was characterized by a hyper-acute self-awareness.
Due to this, we have more first-person accounts of the way a typical evening was spent during this time than of any previous period before in the history of mankind, due mainly to the proliferation of personal blogging software. Unfortunately, insight is limited in wealth of experiences—most activity revolved around streaming video, often done while sitting in one’s underwear.
Variations on this include: listening to “bad” music, often music released in the previous decade, and taking numerous self-portraits on software created by Apple called “photobooth,” meant to be a virtual version of a previous mechanical contraption that produced a strip of images of the individual, one of which often included a shot of a portruding tongue.
The isolated instances are not what fascinate us, but instead it is the manner in which they reflect a collective impulse to publish mundane and unoriginal details as if they were not only unique, but somehow important to advertise, that we believe holds the key to understanding the evolving psyche at the turn of the century. A reocurring self-deprecating tone mystifies us even further, for it is still unclear why the young adult population made a habit out of disparaging the very facts they felt compelled to highlight.
The cause is still a mystery to researchers, but we are continuously thankful that there is so much data from which we can continue to extrapolate theories about the decade of uniform introspection.
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