Anatomy Of A Decade
The Legacy Of The 80's Lives On In The World Of Small Business.
As we move into a new year--and, lest we possibly forget, closer
to a new millennium--let us pause to consider Ronald Reagan, The
Bonfire of the Vanities, "The Big Chill" and MTV. The
1980s were no joke. And though Oliver North, the Cold War and A
Flock of Seagulls may be long gone, the '80s have, in many
ways, set the stage on which we play out our contemporary lives.
"We could argue the '80s never ended," says Gilbert
T. Sewall, senior research associate at Boston University and
editor of The Eighties: A Reader (Addison-Wesley).
"Their so-called spirit has ended, but their legacy
remains."
What exactly is this legacy? The knee-jerk reaction would be to
dub the '80s the decade of greed. "The media constantly
brings up this cliché," says Sewall. "It was more
than that. It was a period of great invention and great
energy." Cable television, microwave ovens, compact discs,
fiber optics, satellites and ATMs were born, as were the first IBM
PC and the Apple Macintosh. Sewall cites three monoliths that began
their iron rule of America in the '80s:
1. Wall Street. The official term was economic
stratification; the official attitude was that only suckers work
for less than $200,000 a year. "There's every possibility
the '80s will be remembered as a decade when the nation
divided," says Sewall, who says the widening income gap is
transforming us into a nation of "castles and trailer
parks."
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2. Silicon Valley. While Sewall finds it
interesting that the entire Stanford University Class of 1972 seems
to have e-mail, what intrigues him more is how technology
"will affect the psychology of the young, how electronic
learning will change children's ways of perceiving."
3. Hollywood. The celebrity culture, an obsession
of the masses, continues full- force in the '90s. Likewise,
Sewall notes, "If there's any [societal] macrotrend of the
last 30 years, it would be the movement away from highly ruled
conformity."
Sewall believes these are the factors that will be on the minds
of entrepreneurs well into the new millennium, now less than 1,000
days away. "The issues of the 21st century are very much upon
us," Sewall says. "And those social and cultural trends
that either hatched or crystallized during the '80s are at the
core of the new millennium's culture."