I read a post by Freya India the other day in which the author beautifully illustrated how incremental changes in technology created incremental changes in how women viewed themselves. The each fun new social media filter and cool new capability eventually lead to a point where young women’s images look so different from reality, they feel a pressure to look as good as their filtered images, and the other women on social media. India said it’s become a thing for these women to get cosmetic surgeries to make themselves look like their instagram filters. Seeing what happened to the women in her generation, she worries for the next generation. This slow incremental change in what “we” as a culture find attractive, and it’s severely harmful effect on women, is familiar to me.
As children, we are exposed to the aesthetics of our parents. The ideals of beauty, the values that our parents created. We watch old shows, listen to old music and live in the worlds of our parents—their home decor, their hair styles, their fashion choices, their exercise routines, their politics, etc. As we get older we become more aware of the outside world. We become influenced by larger trends. Sometimes our parents bring them into our home. Sometimes they don’t. But TV, magazines, social media, traditional media expose us to the new fads, the new looks, the new values. Which, of course, were seeded and built on what came before.
Rarely are societal changes sudden and radical. In public policy theory there is an idea of punctuated equilibrium, in which a major event like 9/11 creates an opportunity for major change. And that one did. We went from Russia and Cold War enemies and concerns in pop culture to xenophobia and middle eastern terrorists. We threw out the value of privacy and glommed onto security as safety. However, the policies enacted after 9/11 did not come from nowhere. They had been presented and rejected before. Their advocates had been working for years to make their ideas familiar. Newt Gingrich had been fomenting political unrest on C-SPAN and then mainstream media. He railed against Democrat’s corruption and ineptitude, and called for virulent action for years. He changed the way politicians talked to each other, attacking his opponents with lies and vitriol, calling cooperation weakness, and opened the doors for talk shows like the Rush Limbaugh show. His changes to the Republican Party led to Dick Cheney as Vice president. The Republicans new how they wanted things to change, they just needed an opportunity. And so when 9/11 happened they were prepared and jumped. And they had prepared their followers (then moderate republicans), who were now sixteen years into hearing about America’s need to be tougher on everything, how everyone who wasn’t white and christian and male was the problem. They incrementally changed politics and culture so that when a major event, a point of punctuated equilibrium happened, they could act.
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