Something I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before (in fact, I know I have) is that the change in technology over time leads to things from different eras seeming somehow… not right. While this makes a TV commercial from a couple decades ago seem odd because there are no website addresses listed, a commercial from today would seem even odder to people of twenty years ago… due to the inclusion of website addresses.
A long thread on Fark discusses this in detail:
This is always fun: write a sentence that wouldn’t have made sense a decade ago
Two writers nail it in the first two submissions:
Facebook friend me, Allison.
and
Hmmm. Let’s make it 2 decades ago.
“She keeps twittering me, so I friended her. I hope she’s got Bluetooth.”
/think of what you’d do if someone said that to you in 1994 or so.
So much of today’s commonplace discussion would be simply incomprehensible gibberish not that long ago. While to a certain degree this has always been the case (23 skidoo!), now it’s due not only to changing slang, but to the rapid introduction of entirely new things, entirely new activities and entirely new concepts.
One thing that hasn’t changed is being shocked and apalled that dates and events that seem not that far in the past really are that far in the past:
I started to do this. Then I realized that a decade ago was 2000, and now I want to french kiss a light socket.
7 Responses to “The March Of Time”
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I understand what you are saying about all of it. If I remember right,
there were no infomercials either unless I am wrong with advertisements
about such small things like CD albums and such which would put me in my late 20’s. Computers were basically used for programming like COBOL,FORTRAN and BASIC except for the fact that “Projidy” might have
already started then. It’s true how times have changed at that.
Sorry, I meant to say “Progidy” and whoever heard of internet sex?
It is going to be fun freaking out young people when I tell they that I remember life before computers in homes. Oh boy.
Jim
Bruce said:
“and whoever heard of internet sex?”
I’m of the old school, and demand to be in the same city as the woman I’m having sex with at the time.
I had a friend who got in video touch via his computer with some Hooters girls down in Florida, thinking the whole thing was a fun little flirtation on their part; about the time they asked him what he’d like to see them do, he answered them, and the lesbian stuff began, he had had a major shock to his entire world-view. 😀
…considering that, has anyone ever done any research on just how far back “Phone Sex” goes?
Because I’ll bet it goes a lot of decades further back than anyone thinks it does.
You can just picture Henry Miller and Anais Nin running up one hell of a French phone bill trying this revolutionary concept out in the 1930’s. 🙂
Jim said:
“It is going to be fun freaking out young people when I tell they that I remember life before computers in homes. Oh boy.”
Remember when all the paintings of future houses had the big things that looked like radar dishes sitting on their roof for no obvious reason?
Who would have thought that those were satellite TV receivers for getting the Playboy Channel after the wife had gone safely to sleep?
I think I mentioned this here before, but running into a computer programmer who is around ten years younger than me, and had never seen or even heard of the ferrite donuts on the wire grid that made up the core memory that was so revolutionary when I was a kid made me realize just how much things have changed while I’ve been alive.
http://xkcd.com/354/