I saw a commercial for Crystal Light (an additive to bottled water) on TV the other day, and their motto was, “Is your water pale?” I remarked to Mrs. Yorick that I never would have guessed that bottled water would ever have grown into such a huge industry. It makes absolutely no sense to me, especially since we live where tap water is plentiful and just as healthy as bottled water. Some cultural changes come as no surprise to me. For instance, I wouldn’t have guessed specifically that baggy droopy-drawer pants would be popular for men, but it doesn’t surprise me that a clothing style that I define as weird would come in vogue.
What changes in your culture today (however you define “culture”) would you never had predicted? A couple of mine:
[ul]
[li]Ring tone mania: I mean, cell phones come as no big technological surprise, but I never would have thought that people would be spending big bucks on the ring tones.[/li][li]The swell of support for gay marriage: It doesn’t seem like that long ago that benefits for same-sex domestic partners was a cutting-edge issue, and now legally recognized marriage seems close to becoming a reality in several states. I don’t think a lot of people much younger than me appreciate what a huge change to a fundamental institution this is.[/li][/ul]
Here’s a perfectly trivial example, but the morphing of the song *YMCA *from a gay anthem into a fun song for kids to sing at elementary school functions has always struck me as a wee bit unexpected.
I think the internet and gaming worlds pouring out into the mainstream has caught me a little bit by surprise at least. When I was little (the days of Super Mario Bros.) gaming was for children, and now it’s the pastime of many responsible adults. With regards to the internet, I guess it’s not so much the widespread usage of the internet so much as the mainstreaming of ‘‘nerd’’ culture. There was a time when Dungeons and Dragons and RPGs and other ‘‘nerd’’ domains did not have mainstream acceptance. Now my grandmother, who is pushing 70, plays Magic: The Gathering, Dance Dance Revolution and Katamari Damacy.
It’s so… weird. It’s the mainstreaming of nerd culture. I don’t know how else to describe it.
These changes are not cultural, more like enforced, but I was still pretty surprised by them.
I used to be in the Navy; my last duty station was in Japan. I returned in 1993. There wasn’t any gas station that had leaded gasoline, everything was unleaded. I had purchased a 1965 Ford pickup, and was panic-stricken that I would be unable to find gas for it.
Every single person riding a motorcycle was wearing a helmet. I had to turn my head while driving, just to make sure it really was everybody.
On a completely unrelated note, my son started junior high this year. He mentioned the old boy-do-my-gym-clothes-smell bit, and I told him that if they got too bad, he could always rinse them in the shower before taking them back to his mom’s place.
“We don’t take showers in gym.”
What?!? Why not?
“There aren’t any.”
Aren’t any?!? Where do you go to shower?!?
“We don’t.”
I’m not sure which one of us was more bewildered; me because junior high kids don’t shower after gym anymore, or my son, who couldn’t figure out why his goofy Dad was demanding that he shower after gym class.
Cellphones actually did surprise me. When I was in high school, it was still only the drug dealers who had “beepers”, and cell phones (well, “car phones”) were only for self-important Wall Street types and neurotic Realtors who couldn’t “afford” to be out of reachability. The rest of us used pay phones or asked to borrow the desk phone at an office.
Ditto on bottled water. Not just “who would pay for water?” but the idea that you have to bring water with you, always. I guess it happened during the hydration craze of the nineties, but I can assure people that we sometimes went whole HOURS without drinking a single thing! Nowadays people act like they’re going to dehydrate in a 20 minute meeting without their water bottle.
I have to say, as a former suburban goth back when that was a bad thing to be, I never though Doc Martens would be worn by schoolteachers. Never thought tattoos would be mainstream. Never thought respectable professionals would have nose or tongue piercings.
And every time I hear a song from the 80’s or 90’s used in a commercial, I cringe and die a little inside. Violent Femmes? Really? Do the people making those ads know that no “normal” people listed to the Femmes, like, ever? All this really cool semi-underground stuff that’s being played on the radio and in advertising as the voice of my generation, when the popular music was actually Jodi Watley and Roxette. (Not that I liked those, but I back then got teased mercilessly for listening to what’s “the hits of the '80s” today.)
I don’t see anything wrong with it, either. After all, it’s just a contract that we can define however we want. I’m surprised that so many people seem to agree with me, though.
Really? Maybe things were different in California but the Femmes were huge when I went to college. They were played on mainstream radio. They were played at frat parties for goodness sake.
I’m surprised by the anti-smoking measures and how far they’ve progressed in just 25 years or so. Watching *Airplane! *the other day, I found myself a little surprised by the “smoking or non-smoking?” option offered to passengers. (And in *Superman, *when Lois smokes at the office while typing.)
I imagine the next generation will someday watch today’s movies which have scenes of people smoking in resturants and bars and have the same reaction.
Seems quite clear what happened-- the responsible adults whose pastime it is to play games were the kids who grew up playing Super Mario Bros. That’s true for me and every other adult gamer I know-- though they’ve reached adulthood, they still play. Perhaps everyone else has figured out that there must be something to all the nerd passions if the nerds are still passionate about them 20+ years later.
In a recent episode of Studio 60, they showed a lead character smoking and it was surprising because it’s been so long since a popular character in a TV show was depicted as a smoker.
I think I’m a bit younger than you. I listened to them at my older brother’s recommendation, and on college radio, but they weren’t Top 40 here in the Midwest.
Lissa, my son (14) is always shocked when we watch an older rom-com and a character is smoking and isn’t evil. “Smoking” is his generation’s cinematic shorthand for “bad guy”.
Interesting, since back when I was in high school, no one showered after gym (it cut too much into the gym class).
It’s odd to see old movies showing someone meeting someone at the airport – just walking up to the gate where the passengers are debarking. No security at all.
You must be correct. I was never a hard-core gamer as a child, and I would describe myself as a pretty serious gamer now (I’m 23.9917 years old) So I guess it just startled me a bit. But certainly my husband has been a gamer all of his life, and the same goes for his friends. It’s just new to me. I for one am happy for this change, because there are many neat things to be discovered in the realm of gaming and websurfing (the SDMB being not the least among them.)
It doesn’t surprise me. Human society is based on the ideal of forming pair bonds and families. Once the mainstream accepted the idea of gay people in general, the next step was expecting gays to form couples and families like “normal” people do. Personally, what surprises me is that anti-gay groups have been able to go against this tide and create any significant opposition to gay marriage. But I feel they’re fighting a losing battle against the weight of human culture.
I’m really surprised by the proliferation of Ipods, because most people just aren’t that into music. 10 years ago, if you saw someone walking around or riding the train with a walkman, they were a die-hard or weirdo that just had to have their music with them. In fact, if the person wearing headphones in public wasn’t a sulking teen, it looked weird because it was generally only sulking teens and weirdos that you’d see wearing headphones in public.
These days, almost everyone on the train is using an Ipod. I really wonder what the businessman, the fratboy, the sorority chick, the office secretary, and grandma over there are listening to!
Maybe podcasts? My husband spends a remarkable amount of time with an earbud in his head, and he’s listening to talk radio (not Rush Limbaugh or anybody, he has these random guys from Boston and LA and Sacramento I’ve never heard of). I don’t know how he can stand it.
I used to deliver papers on my bike, and listened to my Walkman all the time. Now, I’m the last human in California who doesn’t own an Ipod, but I have a ton of music on the computer. Peter Murphy is playing right now. There is some Violent Femmes on there too…
Oh yeah, about the ringtones. I bet that’s going to fade soon–it strikes me as just like answering machine messages. Remember when everyone had some odd song or ‘creative’ message on their machine and they actually sold tapes of songs to put on there? They were new, and you could do it, so a lot of people did, but now you’re lucky to get the person’s actual voice instead of the pre-recorded generic message. I predict the same thing will happen to cell ring tones.
They weren’t Top 40, they were played on the “alternative” station which still had a listenership in the hundreds of thousands. I was a college radio DJ so I personally knew about them before they were so popular but only by about a year. This was all in the early to mid 80’s.