Brooke Black and Skylar Sherman
Staff Writers
As we have grown up in a world of technology and social media, students and young adults have gradually changed their mindset on relationships which could be influencing pop-culture nostalgia because of Netflix. Our parents grew up watching shows in the 80’s and maybe even the early 90’s and as a result they have shared with their children how influential all of them were. Netflix became insanely popular over the past five years so they have expanded their variety of shows especially after hearing what was popular. They have added Friends, Vampire Diaries, The Carrie Diaries, Gossip Girl, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Beverly Hills 90210, That 70’s Show, and more. As a result, we believe that teenagers and young adults have started longing for the relationships portrayed in those type of shows which is old fashioned dating rather than snapchatting and “hanging out.”
Almost every single college and high school student has an account with Netflix and admits to binge watching shows and movies over the weekend and even during the school week. And since people believe that pop-culture nostalgia comes in 20-year cycles it makes perfect sense that the 90’s would be so in right now because so many teenagers think that they missed out on that decade. We decided to create an experiment for our hypothesis that states “If you regularly watch Netflix Shows from the 1990’s to the 2000’s, then you are longing for the relationships portrayed in those shows.” Our survey consisted of questions referring to the volunteer’s age, gender, amount of netflix watched per week, what shows they watched the most, and what their ideal date was. Our results weren’t exactly what we expected to get since most of the volunteer’s were not avid Netflix watchers but we were able to take that information and still made a solid argument about how when you don’t watch a lot of netflix or show from the 1990’s-2000’s then you think that the present day dating is the “best.”
After about 15 surveys were sent out and 12 were returned, even though the information we received wasn’t exactly what we wanted, it did still prove our hypothesis, but in the opposite way we were planning. Of the 12 people whose survey’s we received back, eight of them stated they watched little to no Netflix per week and preferred today’s dating to the dating in the 1990s- early 2000s. While this wasn’t exactly the responses we were searching for, it still proved our theory as true. The students we surveyed didn’t watch very much Netflix, so they preferred today’s dating life. These students may have not necessarily ever witnessed or watched any shows that were portrayed or created in the earlier time period, so they only know of the dating that goes on in today’s society.
In the perfect reality, we would have received surveys from a mixture of students who do and don’t watch Netflix and proved our theory completely right; however, with the information we collected, we can still state that our theory holds true. The more shows you consume from the early 1990s to late 2000s, the more you will long for the dating lifestyle portrayed in that time period and shows. If you don’t watch Netflix or don’t watch those shows, you will prefer the dating lifestyle of current time.
