h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It seems that the 90's, have been nothing more then one major retread of every fad under the sun. From the whole 70's cloths bussiness, to this whole late 80's boy band thing. Isn't anyone out there being creative anymore?

The people with money have always been terrified of "creative types" because we always want to go somewhere new; there's no research for that, the money people want to know they'll get a return on their investment and constantly inventing something new means that consumers won't know if they like it until they sample it.

This is why we're subjected to endless copies of hit films or tv shows: the money-people see a good thing and want to milk it rather than giving us something unknown...besides, that might start us thinking, which is extremely dangerous to marketing people. A country or two full of thinking individuals might not buy something just because they tell us it's wonderful.

I suspect that the '90's has suffered from fad-retreading because of time-compression brought about by computer technology. The psychological feeling out there now (especially among IT people) is that there's never enough time for anything. The normal hormonally-induced feeling of being in a tearing-hurry to go nowhere that teens and young adults feel has been amplified by the computer scene, which has almost everyone convinced that they have to stay current.

Consequently, fads are coming and going at a computer-driven pace.

As long as enough peopele continue to buy into this stuff, it'll continue to happen.

Fruitbat
(for Virtual Mayor of London)

with so much invested in advertising stuff nowadays, i guess it all comes back to picking winners - it's much safer to pick things that have won in the past, than take a punt on something new and untried which might not work, because of the huge amount of publicity that is considered necessary. (which i think is just paraphrasing Fruitbat, not saying anything new) or maybe it's just easier to explain something with reference to something old. hmmmmm. that might explain why so many new books have quotes saying they're like old books, because the customer is assumed to be so dumb that they simply blindly follow authors instead of actually working out what they like from the blurb.

Actually, I tend to follow authors. I find that no matter how terrible a book is, no matter how turgid the prose and lame the plot, there will be some newspaper somewhere with a good quote about it. This then goes onto the cover to snare the unwary. Authors however, tend to be a bit more reliable. Usually.

You might be on to something with the frame-of-reference angle. Sadly, most of the buying public is dreadfully unimaginative.