The 1980s brought in a lot of changes and new inventions that would affect society in the near future. These include: a new “music only” channel called MTV, the personal computer creating a new form of communication, the AIDS epidemic, aspiring entertainers like Michael Jackson and the Challenger explosion. Such events paved the way for the close of the 20th century.
Totally ’80s
For English teacher Mrs. Gretchen Leckie-Ewing and Business teacher Mrs. Kim Nidy, the ’80s brought many fond memories and cultural impacts on their lives. Nidy remembers a defining moment in pop culture: MTV.
“I was sitting in front of my TV waiting,” she said. “I think it made you connect with bands and music so much more because you saw them on TV all the time and watched their music videos over and over again.”
Leckie-Ewing agreed with Nidy that MTV was “amazing.” She added that the Michael Jackson video for “Thriller” was a big event as well.
“When the ‘Thriller’ video came out, everyone stayed home so they could see it,” Leckie-Ewing said. “Afterwards, people called everyone they knew to talk about how great it was.”
While computers were available in the ’80s, Leckie-Ewing and Nidy said they didn’t get to fully use the computers of the era until they were in college or nearly graduated.
“We had a computer, but we still hand wrote most papers, and my senior research paper was typed on an electric typewriter in 1988,” Leckie-Ewing said. “By the time I was in college, we were typing papers and printed them out of dot-matrix printers that had the reams of paper that had holes in the sides to pull it through the printer.”
Nidy added that she used a word processor in high school and didn’t use a mouse until her senior year in college.
“There were a lot of people in my generation who were never comfortable with a computer because it was my generation when the home-based PC was introduced and lots of people were left behind,” Nidy said.
For Nidy and Leckie-Ewing, concerts were a big phenomena during the ’80s. Nidy said that one of the things they did was go to the Richfield Coliseum and Blossom.
“They were relatively inexpensive and fun!” Nidy said. “I remember seeing Bon Jovi, AC/DC, Poison, Ratt, Motley Crue, R.E.M., INXS, Van Halen, The Cars [and] Prince.”
Leckie-Ewing also remembered going to concerts. She said that they were huge, and everyone would get a concert t-shirt to wear to school the next day.
“The most memorable one was Prince’s Purple Rain concert because it was so ‘sexy,’” she said. “Everyone proudly bragged about that concert.”
Leckie-Ewing said that the styles in the early ’80s included name brand clothing and an abundant use of hairspray.
“We used to be able to stand in the girls’ bathroom four rows back from the mirror and get enough hairspray from the extra in front the girls were spraying,” she said. “By the end of the ’80s, we were ‘pegging’ our jeans. We still wore relaxed jeans but we cuffed them tight enough to cut off the circulation in our feet.”
Nidy said that they did a lot of the same “stupid stuff” teenagers do now, but that it was very different.
“We were more respectful towards adults and teachers and did not cross some of the lines that students cross today because we got in big trouble at home,” she said.
According to Leckie-Ewing, AIDS was one of the biggest issues of the ‘80s.
“Watching scientists and politicians try to figure out what this new disease was and what to do about it was riveting,” she said. “People were afraid to go to the dentist, give blood or go to the hospital. No one understood it, and there was a huge stigma attached to it.”
All That, and A Bag of Chips
The 1990’s brought improvements into the technologies that were being brought into normal society from the ‘80s, along with some downturns along the way.
Cell phones and successful Internet (AOL), school shootings (Columbine), political policies (NAFTA) and scandals (Bill Clinton), a new sense of “rebelling” and musical inspirations that would change the frame of the music scene (Kurt Cobain, downfall of “hair metal”), and so on to give the 1980’s a slap to the face.
Math teacher Mr. Troy Kozee and Biomedical Sciences teacher Mr. Ben Janchar said the uprising of “‘90s grunge music” is the culprit for this complete style change. Both said this was the era of wearing “flannel shirts and corduroy pants” as sort of “rebelling against the ‘80s”
“Faded, stone washed jeans were very popular, as were colored jeans,” Kozee said. “I owned a pair of mauve jeans. I am not proud of this fact.”
Kozee said that it was safe to say that the computer “is the defining technology” of his upbringing.
“While computers were definitely less capable and user friendly, they were ironically also easier to understand on a deeper level,” he said.
Both said that there was very little social networking through the Internet.
“The concept of chatting with someone on the computer was foreign to most people,” Kozee said.
Janchar said that there are little differences between teens then and teens now, but there was one big contrast.
“The biggest thing was [that] we actually talked face-to-face with our friends,” he said. “We didn’t have a technology that allowed us to sit in our rooms at home and talk to 20-30 people at a time.”
Kozee also agreed with Janchar that the communication upswing is another big difference from the ‘90s.
“I think we as a culture are still trying to understand what the social implications of the technology will be,” he said. “One major difference is that adolescent drama and misdeeds, common to all generations, are now being played out online where anyone can see them, and preserved for years after. The fact that you attended a party with alcohol when you were 17 may figure in whether or not you’re hired for a job at age 25.”
Although Kozee was not in high school at the time of the Columbine shooting, Janchar said he remembers fully what happened.
“The first thing Columbine did was make teenagers really start to second-guess who was sitting next to them in the class,” he said. “I can remember watching it on TV when I was in school, and at first it seemed like a movie. The instant-news networks that we have now weren’t as prominent when that happened, so it made national news and was on the major channels.”
Kozee said that he thinks every generation will blame the one before it for its problems, and that it believes itself to be “revolutionary and unique in a way that is entirely unprecedented in history.”
“I think that reality is that each generation is more alike than not,” he said, “though certain historical events shape each generation’s perceptions.”