Currently, the major theme and trend of pop culture in the entertainment industry is about post-apocalyptic theme. Especially in the movie industry, it is easy to find movies that talk about zombies, end of world wars and pessimistic future. It is also easy to find popular games such as Metro: Last Light, Gears of Wars, The Walking Dead, Fallout, etc with this type of the themes in the game industry. But why, all of sudden, this post-apocalyptic theme dominates entertainment industry? I know that this type of theme has existed through out the entertainment history. However, I believe that now will be the major and prime era of post-apocalyptic theme of the entertainment industry and history.
In my opinion, one of the reasons why post-apocalyptic theme has become the pop culture through out the world of entertainment industry is because we have consciously or unconsciously noticed that we are one step away from the evolutionary change. We are facing to the moment of the third wave or the fourth wave. According to Alvin Toffler, he mentioned that our economy, society, politic and living system have evolved through out our history as the first wave and the second wave. However, there’s no way to assume when could be the exact moment to define them and why this changes happened.
Yet, we could not predict when will be our next huge change. We could feel that the moment is not that far away in the future. Just because we don’t know when it will be, I believe that people might consciously and unconsciously want to express their fear toward the unpredictable evolutionary change as the post-apocalyptic pop culture.
We have developed our technologies in very short period of time and we could not live without these technologies in our daily routines. As the technology has evolved, our economy, ways of living and especially marketing strategies are highly affected by this hi-technology development. Now we are face to the situation that is hard to live without the Internet, smart phone, ubiquitous computing system, etc.
Along with this evolutionary phenomenon, our entertainment industry has also evolved hugely. In just 20 years ago, we never thought about the music industry without CDs, social media marketing and digital book market systems. Every concept that people thought would be forever in entertainment industry has been crashed or replaced with other new concept.
The current post-apocalyptic pop culture might just be reflection of our fear toward our fast-faced evolution process. However, I believe that we have strong ability to adapt ourselves to new environment to survive and the new wave of our future will not destroy us. The future will be our good and convenient friend. We don’t have to anticipate how our future will be, but we need to ready to evolve ourselves. Maybe we are middle of the new evolutionary wave.
Hey Dong,
ReplyDeleteI'd like to start by saying that this is a pretty cool looking blog, I like the color's and the layout. Your take on the post-apocalyptic world trend is pretty interesting. I never actually looked at it as us expressing a fear of our evolution, but it does make a lot of sense. Especially when you see the movies and games in where we actually are the cause of the "apocalypse" by creating or releasing something toxic. Maybe we're evolving faster than we should be and getting a little careless huh? Anyway, nice article, I look forward to reading more!