I hear you, Goddess - I asked a very similar question a few months back (about '94) and feel it's time I repaid the favour. I'm guessing you don't want the stuff you can find easy online (film, music, clothes etc), you want the feel of the era.
Note - this is from a male, UK and suburban perspective. But some of this may be useful. In no real order...
- It's the 'Indian Summer' of magazines. It would be rare to find a teen who didn't read at least one; and often it would be kicking around their school bag (handily showing what 'kind' of person they were). Wednesdays were great, for it would be the time I got my new Kerrang!, Melody Maker, and N64 Magazine. It was quite often the most reliable way of finding out about new things. (Memories of going through the small ads at the back, wondering what catalogs I should ask for.)
- Arrrgh! Y2K! It's laughable now, but people then really did think the world was going to end. I remember being a little freaked out by the UK Government's 'mascot' for it; a sinister-looking microchip.
The historian/sociologist within me sees this as a sign of how safe we felt back then; a world where 'global warming' (then called 'the greenhouse effect') was only mentioned in dusty science lessons, 'Islamic terrorism' was some odd idea Hollywood used now and again, Anglo-Saxon capitalism was held to be inherently good and without fault, Russia was a joke and China was just a huge sweatshop that couldn't produce a car without causing peels of laughter.
- The internet is waiting in the wings, at least for us masses. This is the time that many teens first got the taste of it at home, where their parents had heard enough about this 'information superhighway' from TV/newspapers and decide to finally get a 56k modem for the family computer. For most, email seemed to serve as not much more the swapping of internet links; searches (I remember I used AltaVista back then) were clunky and it took forever to find what you wanted, that's assuming you actually did. My teachers actively derided it, not accepting it as sources of information. In fact, my science teacher actually told us in '99 that the Internet would never replace books as a source of information. Oh, and nobody would actually buy anything online (at least nobody I knew).
- TV is still king. While most teens had access to a separate telly in another room or their own, the habit of wanting to use the 'big telly' got worse in some ways, as it was often the only one with a screen 20 inch plus, had a VCR and perhaps was connected to cable / satellite. In this period, my TV in my room was a tiny black-white tune-in-by-hand number with 'halo' aerial which you'd constantly be fiddling with to get a good signal.
- All hail the CD. Nearly all teens have a CD player, and a few had Discmans. Many magazines gave free CD's, giving your music collection a little more depth, 'cos CD's were pretty pricey (unless you wanted the cheap crud from supermarkets). Copy a CD? PC disc-burners did exist, but they were real expensive and not really reliable - so if you wanted to copy a mate's Greenday CD, you had to do it with a cassette. While Napster 1.0 was waiting in the wings (or had just launched), nobody I knew had a bandwidth big enough to take advantage of it.
- Argh! Dead battery! Know how often this came up? Before Lithium batteries, all the stuff seemed to die real quickly. With the exception of mobile phones, everything required old school batteries. Memories of going round the house nicking AA's from remotes/clocks/the kitchen drawer so I could listen to my Walkman on the way to school. In fact, I remember the Fire Service doing a series of ads telling parents not to nick the batteries out of the smoke alarms to power their kid's presents at Christmas.
- VHS rip-off! You liked a TV series? Want to watch it again? Well, here's the video for it. Only £10 for Series 1, part 4 (of 8). A whole season would take up a good 8 inches of shelf-space. The fact that some makers milked this for all it was worth was even worse; while a tape could handle 3 hours of viewing, they'd often only put an hour/hour-half on it. The Simpsons were pretty bad, but South Park was the worst of the lot - 2 episodes (~40 mins) per tape. Though this was the time when it was at the peak of cool.
- Cash is (the aeging) king. If you pulled out a card to pay for a coffee and magazine, expect to be tutted at or to be told point-blank it didn't cost enough for you to use it. Some stores still didn't have the facility for it either. Having wads of cash didn't immediately mark you out as a drug-dealer... though was starting to get a little suspicious.
- Wow! Pay-as-you-go! I'd say it was this that allowed mobile phones to enter the territory of 'mass market'; allowing teenagers to get hold of one without threatening their parents with ££££ bills at the end of the month. In '97, no kid had one, by '02, around 75% did. This was the zenith of Nokia, remember their 3210 (launched '99) was like the coolest phone to have. Battery life was pretty good, sturdier than most of the phones around today, and you could even send these 'text message' things! (Phone credit was cripplingly expensive back then).
It's complete with messages from way back then that I can't make myself delete.
