Across social media, there is a tendency to announce the passing of time with consternation, with observations like “Can you believe the Ice Bucket Challenge was 10 years ago?”, “Did you know that Gary Lineker is four years older than Des Lynam was when he retired?”, or “The Rizzler was born a year after the first Trump inauguration.”
The implication is that something strange is happening with time itself. That life on earth is both speeding up and slowing down, fluctuating in myriad directions and presenting fly-by-night crazes and superstars, all while evergreen, indefatigable titans of media and politics live on well past their sell-by dates. The forces of change and the forces of stasis are grinding up against each other with dizzying results.
In 2024, this sensation went into overdrive. It has been an intense, ephemeral, yet strangely cyclical year – 365 days that travelled at breakneck speed, yet only in a rather predictable direction. Not so much a rollercoaster as a broken waltzer. It was, perhaps, the year when time as we know it imploded.
When talking to a friend of mine recently, he expressed disbelief that the Olympics were just a few months ago. Granted, not everyone will be as confused as he is, but there’s no denying that the viral stars of that tournament – like the Turkish and South Korean shooting sensations – now seem as passe as 2012-era YouTubers or retired footballers.
The Australian breakdancer and purveyor of deep cringe, Ray Gun, was inescapable for a brief moment in late summer, yet today seems as much of a figment of the recent past as Tay Zonday or The Wealdstone Raider.
Nowhere is this sense more palpable than in the short-form digital content arena. In this universe, someone like Hailey “Hawk Tuah” Welch can go from an unvarnished, accidental star, to a controversial crypto promoter in just six, heady months, while American streamer iShowSpeed exists in a constant state of Beatlemania, being chased around the world by giddy teenagers in an effort to squeeze every drop of fame from his 15 minutes.
But warp speed is just one of the settings on the dashboard of contemporary reality. Compounding the strangeness is a sense that some products, some people, simply last forever – whether we want them or not.
On television – an increasingly grey medium – time moves at a glacial pace. Dragon’s Den is celebrating its 20th anniversary next year, while Saturday Kitchen could have feasibly graduated university and completed a masters if it were a human being. Mrs Brown’s Boys remains indelibly popular despite the fact you will never meet anyone who watches it, and it’s very telling that a show like MasterChef (also 20 next year) could not go gently into the good night in the wake of the Gregg Wallace mega-scandal, but has simply recast his role, in lieu of much else to commission.
In music, while a new generation of young, emotionally literate female singers like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter have captured the youth market, the biggest furore was reserved for the Oasis reunion – which will either signal an ecstatic display of mass-nostalgia not seen since Winston Churchill died, or a slow-motion car crash projected at Premier League proportions.
This phenomenon ties in with the pop philosopher Paul Skallas’s theory of “stuck culture”, whereby popular entertainment and mass culture have become trapped in an endless feedback loop of reruns, reboots, franchises and monolithic celebrities that refuse to budge.
For every hyper online artist like Chappell Roan or iShowSpeed, there is a highly depressing fact, like eight out of the 10 highest-grossing films of the year being sequels (the exceptions being the Wicked reboot and a Chinese romantic comedy called YOLO).
You can also see this in politics. Despite the geopolitical chaos and the lunacy of the Trump campaign, we are still ruled by a very familiar cast of characters – and keep voting for them in lieu of real change. The Donald is back, Macron is clinging on, and perhaps, in appointing 90s relic Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, Keir Starmer is playing upon some widespread desire for coherency. A not-so-friendly face in the crowd.
Joe Biden let us all down in 2024
Read MoreYet amongst the undergrowth, impressive, disturbings things are happening – ones which may manifest in untold ways. 2024 will probably go down as the year in which AI became all too real, the moment in which you first saw a picture of a news event, and wondered if it was even real. It was the year when Twitter, for so long the frontline of citizen journalism, became a dubious, unaccountable and corrupt mess of bot comments and bad faith bile.
There is no doubt that this was a seismic year, perhaps something akin to 1969 or 201 BC. It was the year many of us realised that we are locked into a new cold war with flashes of devastating heat, where fascinating geopolitics left the machinations of Westminster looking incredibly petty. There’s been coups, revolutions, riots, botched assassinations, completed assassinations, and presidential candidates on podcasts. It wasn’t as outwardly insane as 2020, but it was far more exciting.
The psychological effect of all this is one where we live in the past, present and future at all times. You want to look away, but you don’t want to miss out. It all makes you feel old and young at the same time. Perhaps this is why Charli XCX, the 30-something party girl and Taylor Swift, the perennial confused millennial, were the two biggest pop stars of the year. These are artists with uncertainty and rootlessness at the heart of what they do.
Where it all goes from here, is anyone’s guess. The cat is out of the bag, the horse has bolted. But were they ever in place? Or did we just have a safe mass media narrative to rely on? There seems to be two routes you can take, lie back and let the next series of The Apprentice wash over you, or strap yourself into the madness of the moment.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Not so much a rollercoaster as a broken waltzer )
Also on site :
- Children evacuated from Swindon school after threats of ‘suspicious package’
- Anna Camp's Instagram Story about Jade Whipkey Sparks Dating Buzz
- Patrick Mahomes says ‘cut the cameras’ in emotional locker room scenes as new Kansas City Chiefs doc trailer is released