IIRC there’s a scene in The Birdman of Alcatraz, where he’s finally being released, and a reporter asks him if he’s ever seen television–and he says no, but from what he’s heard he hasn’t missed much.
As another example, in The Shawshank Redemption there was the character Brooks, who entered the prison in in “Aught-Five”, and was released fifty years later, in 1955. Shortly thereafter he nearly gets run over by a car because he has no idea about the dangers of crossing a modern, busy street, though he does say he saw one of those “auto-MO-biles” when he was a kid.
So, seeing the concurrent thread about losing-side memoirs of WWII, I got to wondering if there were any memoirs from people who spent thirty or forty years in prison, between about 1900 and 1935 or 1040. There was a tremendous explosion of technological innovations that affected every aspect of everyday life…radio, automobiles, airplanes, phones, and so on. Granted some things, like telephones, were already there in 1900, but their usage then wasn’t anything like it was forty years later.