Do you think 1990 has more in common with 1968 or 2012?

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I was born in 1990. Amazingly, my birth year is as close to 1968 as it is to the present!

Which year would you say 1990 overall has more in common with, the year 22 years before (1968) or 22 after (2012)? Personally I would say 1990 has slightly more in common with 2012. Hip hop music, similarish slang, the presence of computers though the Internet was just being invented, but really it is probably almost as much like 1968.

I think 1990 was like 1990.

1990 is more like 2012 than 1968 because 1968 was far more turbulent. On the other hand 1990 is similar to the present because we(USA) do not appear what direction we are going.

I was born in 1971, and I also think that the early 90s were much closer to 2012. There were far greater cultural and technological achievements in the time between my birth and 1990 than in the last 22 years. By 1990, personal computers, home computers and game consoles were already quite widespread and could be found in many households. Not to mention offices, where most typewriters had been replaced by desktop PCs and printers.

The commercial internet was still in its fledgling stages, but it was rapidly becoming popular, and computer geeks had been using online servers (so-called Bulletin Board Systems) via Telnet for quite a while. I remember that in the mid-1980s, a school friend of mine, who was lucky enough to have his own phone in his room, went online with an acoustic coupler hooked up to his Commodore 64. He used message boards on BBS servers and downloaded pirated computer games as well as porn images. Pretty much the same things kids do nowadays. So the internet was not exactly revolutionary.

Music had already gone digital too. Music CDs became popular during the 1980s, and 1990 brought us the recordable CD. People walked around with portable CD players instead of iPods, which were as popular as the portable cassette players (the legendary Walkman) in the 1980s. In 1968, walking around with headphones listening to music in the streets was unheard of. People didn't even have ghetto blasters. As for household technology, a kitchen in the 1990s looked exactly like a modern day kitchen with a dishwasher and a microwave oven. Medical technology in hospitals didn't look much different either. And cell phones were a rare sight, but the technology did exist.

Culturally speaking, there is also not much new under the sun since 1990. Western societies were already quite gender-equal back then, homosexuality and transsexuality were no longer regarded as mental disorders, laws against gay sex and crossdressing had been abolished in nearly all developed countries, and pornography was no big deal anymore. People were already very concerned about the environment, global warming was already an issue, and everyone had begun to recycle and separate their waste. And you already mentioned music. Rock, hardrock & metal, techno, rap & hip hop, goth... we had it all back then. I can't think of any ground-breakingly new music genre since the 90s. Architecture, art and fashion haven't changed much either. Which begs the question, have we become culturally stagnant?

Just to illustrate my point, here is an office scene from the 1960s (with happy Stepford secretaries, one of the few jobs that women could get back then):



And here is an office from 1990:

[img][550:370]http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/photolib/scenery/1990s%20Open%20Plan%20Office.jpg[/img]

Replace the CRT monitors with LCD displays, and it looks almost exactly like a modern day office.

I think that 2012 has more in common with 1968. There are enough hippies where I live.

I am personally familiar with 1968 and see no similarity with 1990 or 2012, which belong to an entirely different era. If I had to choose a year in history that might be similar to 2012, I'd pick 1937 (with which I am not personally familiar). It was a time when the economy was climbing out of the Depression, but the man on the street didn't feel it yet.

There were cars in 1990 as there are now, computer games and video games, but they were all different back then. Everything looked different then, diapers, strollers, other baby equipment, toys, people used walkmen than ipods, not many people used cell phones, only business people did, laptops were not common and they were very big then too, computers weren't common either so many families did not have one nor the internet. I don't see 2012 the same as it was 22 years ago.

I would describe 1968 as a time of creativity and experimentation, and I would describe 1990 as a time of plasticity and shallowness (it was right after the 1980s after all), so I don't really connect the two. 2012, however, sees people being even more shallow than ever.

I was born in 1990 too so it's hard to compare it to any other year.

I voted 1968 because it has 19 in it

A 22-year old asks in 1990: "What year is more similar to my birth year of 1968? Is it 1990, or 1946?" I think that many people might just answer this question with 1990. We tend to look at time from an angle of progression. The earliest date we are given in any sequence of dates, will be the 'zero date'. In this case, 1968. The construction of the question, or rather our interpretation of it, will take '68 as a starting point from which events progress over the 22 years into 1990, then over the 22 years into 2012.

Furthermore, the latter 22-year period is fresher in the memories of all of us who remember it at all. "1995 still feels like yesterday to me". The former 22-year period is longer ago, and many posters, including you donnie, haven't actively experienced all 22 years of it, if any at all. As for me, my memory only starts in 1990, I have maybe ONE memory before that.

I experience this world as vastly different from what we had in 1990. A different attitude, different international dynamics, different pop culture, different technology. I can't say much about '68, because for me, '68 is ancient history. I can ask my mother, my aunts, my older colleagues, to get an impression of it, and that's very valuable. But I'll never know what it was really like. Just as my children would not know what 1990 was like, and how actually living in 1990 compares to whatever year they'll be 3 years old.

I have a penchant for dates and numbers, and I was recently engaged in an activity not too dissimilar from the premise of this thread; I was listening to the top 100 chart of 1962, the year 25 years before I was born (as I am 25 now). I was kind of amazed at the amount of good quality songs in the top 20. Was listening to some Cliff Richard and Elvis, as young boys, and thought "Well, the sentiments expressed in these songs are not too different from that of today's youth in 2012, aside from cosmetic factors and some differing views/philosophies related to the zeitgeist".

Look at it this way: '68 was near the end of the '60s, and from '68 to 1990, we really have 2 decades: the 70s and the 80s. From 1990 to 2012, we about have the 90s and the 2000s.

-In '90 we had Vanilla Ice. In 2000, we had Eminem.
-In '90 our phones were plugged into our walls. By 2000, kids took their phones to school in their pockets.
-In '90 there were millions of saiga antelopes on the Asian steppes. By 2000, there were 50,000 left.
-In '90 we had the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.
-In '90 the European Union counted 12 members. By 2010, there are 27 member states, of which 17 members have shifted to the euro as currency.
-In '90, a household could function perfectly without a computer. By 2010, every house contains several computers of various sizes and functions.
-In '90, incurring AIDS meant certain death. By 2010, we're using anti-retroviral drugs to keep it down.
-In 2000, same-sex couples could not marry. By 2010 gay marriage is recognised in 9 countries (slow progress).
-In '90, we valued our privacy. By 2010, privacy no longer exists.
-In the 90s, popular opinion in the Netherlands was favourable toward people of immigrant descent. By 2010, one in six Dutch people is voting for a populist anti-immigrant political party.

1990 and 1968 were both in the 20th century. That is what they have in common.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012

Theres not enough supporting information as 2012 isn't finished yet. But from what I can tell thus far I'd consider 1990 more like 2012 due to political climate.