Following the conventional calendar, we can say that the 2000s, 2010s, and this very decade of ours now, the 2020s, has an immense number of young adults who admire the entertainment of their childhood.

This was not very common in the 1960s, in the 1970s, even to some degree in the 1980s, the last full decade of the Cold War. It's really in the 90s, the decade when digital technology starts phasing out analog technology, that this positive reinforcement begins to happen.

Sociologists like Juliet Schor describes this phenomenon very well in her book, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (2005) and another one in 2008 by Gary Cross, Men to Boys. Among other sociologists like Benjamin Barber, Susan Linn, etc...

The young adults of today are largely those who grew up with the Disney of Michael Eisner, the CEO who revolutionized the industry and 'modernized' it one might say. This came with Disney videogames, the iconic sitcoms on Disney Channel, Disney Pixar, the Disney websites among other ones, etc... the ones who also grew up with certain bands and artists that were marketed towards youth demographics by the recording labels.

The ubiquity of mobile technology by the latter half of the 2000s made it so that everybody can access internet content at the palm of their hands when and where they want. This is what largely led to the popularity of meme culture, the social networks playing a role as well.

But when we look at the pre-digital world, young adults weren't as interested in re-consuming the content of their childhood and adolescence. It wasn't as popular a phenomenon as it is now.

Another example of this would be when you compare the young adults of the 1940s and 50s to those of the 1900s and 1910s. The former had a childhood watching talking films, of Disney's old animations and things like the Wizard of Oz. But the young adults of the older period never had memories of talking movies because they didn't exist, no memory of a childhood with gramophones and vinyls and so all music was heard live.

In other words, there was no technology that _reinforced_ the media content of childhood all their life long for these older generations at the turn of the 20th century. When we get into the Cold War decades, then indeed you do have such a technology of reinforcement; analog television, video cassettes, vinyls, etc...

But despite many young adults being able to collect such analog merchandise in their day, it was really through the digital and internet mediums that this perpetual reinforcement of entertainment was able to grow.

Some people say that the demand would exist regardless of the technology, but I have trouble believing that. There's a parallel between behavioral patterns in cultures and the technology that influences them.

Tempora mutantur et nos mutantur in illis