When we think of the 1960s, we think of youthful rebellion and social upheaval, while we associate the 1970s with hedonism, disco music and the Arab oil embargo that left motorists in long lines at the gas pump. The 1980s evoke images of excess--pinstripe-clad corporate raiders greedily gobbling up companies like Pac-Man, and pop singers with aerodynamic mullets and parachute pants gyrating on MTV. But the 1990s, in contrast, elude such facile characterization. It was a decade of jarring, sometimes incongruous motifs without a theme to tie them coherently together— the Persian Gulf War, the coming of age of Generation X, the sudden popularity of tattooing, the O.J. Simpson case, AOL diskettes in your mailbox, goatees, Seinfeld, the rise of anti-government militias, Princess Diana’s death in a car crash, Quentin Tarantino movies, the Dotcom bubble, fear of Y2K.
The 1990s were a revolutionary decade for digital technology. Between 1990 and 1997, individual personal computer ownership in the US rose from 15 to 35%. Cell phones of the early-1990s and earlier ones were very large, lacked extra features, and were used by only a few percent of the population of even the wealthiest nations. Only a few million people used online services in 1990, and the World Wide Web had only just been invented. The first web browser went online in 1993 and by 2001, more than 50% of some Western countries had Internet access, and more than 25% had cell phone access. On August 6, 1992, CERN, a pan European organization for particle research, publicized the new World Wide Web project. Although the basic applications and guidelines that make the Internet possible had existed for almost two decades, the network did not gain a public face until the 1990s. Driven by mass adoption, consumer personal computer specifications increased dramatically during the 1990s, from 512Kb RAM 12 MHz Turbo XTs in 1990, to 25-66Mhz 80486-class at the start of the popularization of the World Wide Web mid-decade, to over 1 GHz CPUs with close to a gigabyte of RAM by 2000.
Life in the 90s was fast paced with many trends but there were still important developments in pop culture that stood out more than others, with the introduction of Tamagotchi, titanic and Pokemon as well as the change in the value of trendy clothes. “Nevermind” and grunge style had a large and significant effect on how people thought and lived in the 1990s and that is what makes them one of the most important aspects of pop culture.