I was born in 1951. My kids don’t have to worry about getting nuked. We didn’t have to worry about them getting polio, like my parents did.
My wife mentioned that a friend of hers, who is 67, is going to have to get a new knee. That was not something anyone said in 1951. My wife had a detached retina which got replaced by complicated microsurgery and lasers. She’d be blind in that eye in 1951. In 1962 my father, who was in his mid-40s, spent months in the hospital due to a blood clot in his leg. About five years ago he had one in his heart, at 90. They fixed it with a double stent and he was out in two days.
Not to mention that we can communicate much more easily with our daughter in Germany, 6,000 miles away, than I could with my parents who were only 200 miles away when I was in college.
The world is a lot better than it was 60 years ago.
Check out the posts again. I was just thinking it is the younger posters who think the world is going to hell in a hand-basket.
I just noticed something else today - cleaning equipment is a lot better. That only seems trivial if you don’t remember wringing a string mop out by hand or changing the bag in the vacuum. (Of course, I don’t remember every cleaning product having quite so powerful cheap perfume when I was a kid. That one point for a hell, no.)
Internet scorn as well is great.
It seems like the world has grown more narrow and fascist in my age. But it was highlighted by some extended time of liberal utopia. These republican times are the Dark Ages of my American Experience. I doubt we will ever recover.
I opened this thread just to vote “other” only to see that you beat me to the punch.
I was born in 1984 and I picked the first option. I will now ramble on at random about why.
No more Reagan, no more Bush, no more Russkies’ dirty looks!
Computer networking. I can’t tell you how much my life improved when I finally got online and found out just how many atheists there were, that the whole world wasn’t like southeast Missouri Southern Baptist Land. I’ve been similarly reassured about other aspects of myself, but that was the big one for me. Kids coming up now will have access to the same information younger, which should make them much happier overall.
We are on the verge of finally living out the true meaning of our creed as regards gays and the transgendered, something that was coming in 1984 but was a lot further away then than it is now.
The HPV vaccine has gone from the development stage to Gardasil over roughly the span of my lifetime. That’s a form of cancer being effectively treated.
Violent crime is down. I mean way down, everywhere in the country. This happened over the 1990s. Media depictions have yet to catch up.
Atheism is less stigmatized in this country now than it was. It is at least being presented as a viable option, as opposed to being ignored (if the atheists were lucky it was ignored) like it was. And yes, Mr. Bush, atheists are citizens.
The media is larger now. TV and radio have been supplemented (not quite supplanted) by the Internet, by which I mean ‘you and me’ (by which I mean, ‘the ones who killed the Kennedies’). Webcomics are better in every respect than newspaper comics have been in decades, the best blogs are better than the best newsmagazines and newspaper op-ed pieces, web videos are mostly better than TV, especially network TV, and streaming radio makes AM and FM sound like sadness wrapped in commercials and stuck inside stupidity. Mass media and massless media might not be able to coexist, but we have a chance to see the best one win.
Cell phones. For every hundred annoyances, they probably save a life. That’s the definition of ‘worth it’.
One more thing:
DTV. I get more channels, emergency services get the frequencies they need, and congenital whiners get something new to whine about. Everyone wins.
I’m a bit surprise that so many believe the internet has made the world a better place; the information was out there, often in large buildings with high ceilings and the sweet smell of paper. True, we all have better, easier access to information, but we are being buried under an avalanches of lies and other nasty things - violent pornography, fundamentalist spam. And we waste far too much time on it.
I find the internet a net zero, but then I’ve always lived in places with good libraries and news sources.
And there’s that.
If you think the Internet only contains what was always in libraries, you’re sadly mistaken. The citizen journalism and the much broader range of opinions than were ever allowed to see print make the Internet a much broader place than any libraries could ever be. Especially libraries run by religious zealots whose primary goal is to keep the ‘inappropriate’ out of the hands of the interested.
The takedown of the Burzynski Clinic is a fine example of something that relied on the Internet to occur; if the skeptics were limited to print, the Clinic would have been able to quash publication with its bogus threats, as the possible profit from printing would never have recouped the threatened losses from lawsuits. A lot of similar things have happened, all of which would have been stopped by threats of lawsuits before the Internet made global publishing a one-click event.
You find what you look for.
I suggest you lack imagination. You can use a mobile device to access libraries and as Derleth points out other information, pretty much anywhere. Internet access probably saves lives, enriches many experiences including actually visiting libraries, and alleviates loneliness and isolation especially for the least mobile people, for whom visiting a library is unfeasible. Up to around 2000 I didn’t think the internet was all that big a deal as good information was patchy. Now google, wikipedia and many other sources offer all the “real” content you could want, while filtering out all the nasty things you don’t. But hey you can get the nasty things too if that’s your bag. I buy a newspaper if I’m commuting but I daily read articles online from every major English language newspaper, getting a wide range of perspectives, and increasing my knowledge of the world. Don’t get me wrong I think the internet has its downsides too but I wouldn’t begin to imagine they outweigh its many benefits to those who can afford to engage with it.
As someone who worked in libraries while the Internet was still in its teething stages (the late 90s) and today, there’s just no comparison. There’s nothing we could find for patrons back then that even comes close to what the Internet offers today. Wikipedia alone is a godsend for all the “researchers” who have no idea what they really want, but need to start somewhere.
Yes, to all of you. I cannot remember what I did before the internet for a lot of things. And I admit my opinion is colored by the fact that I really miss the card catalogs - remember them? - as a source of serendipity.
However, for ever critical story broken on the internet, 12 idiots who believe the twin towers were blown up so no-one would find out the moon-landings were a hoax are spawned. Yes, the foolish will always be with us, but I don’t believe they received quite so much encouragement in the hard copy age.
[Edit - go check out the flu-shot thread]
And don’t get me started on the victim porn …
Card catalogs looked cool, but were an absolute pain from a usage standpoint. Good riddance.
What’s victim porn?
But the internet isn’t used only by individuals; it’s a critical part of global business operations, and it’s commerce and trade that improve the world and people’s standards of living throughout the globe. If (for some hypothetical reason) individuals had never been allowed to participate on the internet, the global network would still have been one of the greatest works of engineering to ever improve the world.
I’ve not performed a search in a library since the 1990’s I’m afraid, so maybe search interfaces have improved. But then the card catalogues were first replaced, the computers sucked. They allowed pure database searches without the ability to browse, and there was always a wait to use a computer because there were only six of them versus 200 drawers of cards! But mostly, the not being able to browse was the worst part.
On further consideration: Actually, I have searched in the last year. My county library system has a regional search facility. However I was looking for a very specific work and not interested in browsing.
Pretty much. I was born in um, 1978, and the Cold War is over – no more Berlin Wall or USSR. I remember when it happened, and it was such a huge deal. I remember hearing about the Wall on the news that night.
Gay and women’s rights have improved. Technology has boomed – Jesus, Qin, I don’t think I even used the internet until the year you were born. (God, I feel old)
Mind you, of course, there are always going to be things that are worse – that’s just human nature.
The one thing I love about our local library system is being able to order books I want to read from home. I just look it up in the card catalog online, then request it, and have it sent to the library of my choice. They call me (by an electronic voice, mind you), when it arrives. I love it!
Thank you, Andrew Carnegie!
(And how anyone could like card catalogs is beyond me. Blech)
They’d be ardent believers in the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories instead, like a huge number of people before the Internet were. Or perhaps anti-black/anti-white/anti-Asian/etc. conspiracy theories. The words have changed but not the music.
A big change in the Internet age is Snopes and other debunking resources, which would likely be impossible to publish in book form because they’d never be able to recoup their costs with book sales.
We should stop hijacking the thread, but, hmm, okay, the internet has improved the world, if you all say so. But I will always miss the cards, and the tidy and effective way the categorized subjects.
Victim porn - those horrible little stories about crimes agains children and the handicapped (is that still an acceptable term?) and religious or charity workers, that go on and on, that don’t serve any function beyond allowing people to gasp “How horrible! [I’m glad it wasn’t me or mine - I wonder what they did to bring it on themselves?]” They’re much more prevalent now, I think.
The internet is spreading ignorance and cruelty just as quickly as knowledge.
Even as a far-right lifelong Republican, I must reluctantly agree with this. (although I still believe that left-wing policies, if allowed to run unchecked, would be disastrous)
As for me (re the OP)? Hell, I was born before Spandex was invented. My eyes tell me the world has improved a lot. 
^ This ^ I was probably conceived at about the time of VJ Day.
Plus medical advances: No more smallpox. Far less chance of polio. Immunizations are available for a lot of potentially fatal diseases. Open-heart surgery (gave my dad three additional decades of life and so far has given my husband 20 years additional for sure).