[lhorie]

The web has always been a mish-mash of crazy hippie stuff alongside dry boring stuff. There was a lot of personalized personal webpages sure, but also search engines used to look dry and boring and emojis in chat were limited to what you could do with ASCII art (compared to the insane amount of animated sticker spammy-ness that a teen might use these days).

With that said, I do agree with GP with regards to things outside of the web: products have a lot more franchise placements (e.g. disney-themed shampoos), and school for my kids have a lot more of an artsy/hippie feel than I remember my dry seats-facing-forward education some 30 years ago. Gaming among adults is far more socially accepted than 30 years ago - you wouldn't even bat an eyelid at an old lady playing candy crush in the bus these days. Etc.

I suspect an increase in middle class disposable income might have something to do with this. Look, for example, at how culture progressed over the decades in Japan. Nowadays, you have grown adults who are into moe[0] stuff, along all sort of "infantile" subcultures (by western standards).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_(slang)