I think that, more than the changes in technology, the way that people employ the technology would be difficult to understand. In the 50’s, when someone turned on the radio or television, it was because they wanted to listen to or watch a specific program. Nowadays those things are used mainly for background noise. Even if someone is interested in the program, they are not focused on the program in the way that folks were in the 50’s.
Likewise “multi-tasking”. The idea that someone would turn on the TV and then get out their phone and watch that and the TV at the same time would baffle a 50’s denizen.
Lack of attention span would also be puzzling. For someone who watched hour-long TV programs, it would be strange that people now can’t sit through a four-minute video without getting bored and starting to do something else. In the same vein, they’d be amazed that newspaper articles have shrunk from thousands or tens of thousands or words to a few hundreds, and that magazines like Teen People now have “articles” 50 words long. Magazines like Lucky that are entirely advertising would look strange as well.
The hardest thing to explain to someone from the 50s would be the popularity of the Kardashians. If you suceed in explaining it to them do me a favor and explain it to me, because I still don’t get it
How fast ‘fashion’ moves. Not just clothing, but that someone (possibly someone in a different country) can come up with a picture or joke, and suddenly it’s everywhere- your friends are making the same joke, it’s on shop signs… all over the place.
Then a week or so later, that’s it, it’s gone- there’s a new picture, story or joke doing the rounds. You can go away for a week, and by the time you come back, you’re out of date- it doesn’t matter if you live in a big city or small town.
That statement is funnier than you think … as I remember correctly, sitting in the back seat as a kid of course, the lawmen would give you a ticket for an open container pour it out and let you go.
Plus there were places where you had to brown bag it to be able to drink in a restaurant or somewhere like the Moose Lodge.
While the effect is well known, I believe it is controversial whether or not people are really getting smarter in general or if society adapts to the latest IQ tests e.g. by changing the focus in schools to better match the material tested. If it’s the second, it’s evidence that we aren’t actually measuring IQ correctly, but that we’re actually measuring book learning or socialization.
I bought my TiVo (another thing that would be hard to explain to a time traveler from the 1950s) in 2011, and it was auto-programmed to record anything Kardashian. :rolleyes: I had to call customer support to remove it.
The large numbers of women doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. and the fact that anyone with an IQ high enough to go to college can now do so is a big change as well.
Good one. Not just that, but the different types of food. I was born in 1951, and I remember the commercials for “exotic” Chun King Chow Mein from the early 1960s. Now there is a vast variety of what used to be called ethnic food in supermarkets, not to mention the variety of restaurants.
Ubiquitous microwaves and food for microwaves would be pretty shocking also. Put food in a box, press some buttons, hear some beeps (you didn’t hear a lot of beeps in the '50s) and the food comes out hot without anything obvious happening to it.
I think people talking about SSM etc are missing something more obvious. In the 1950s and 1960s checking into a hotel or motel with someone you were not married to was a death defying feat. Firesign Theatre at the end of the '60s had a joke about a hotel register reading Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. Who cares about that anymore? Living with someone you were not married to was reserved for maybe the underclass and artists. (Remember Three’s Company?) Who has even thought about that in ages? Plus we have co-ed dorms and no restrictions on visits from the opposite sex, which was just starting in the late '60s.
The '50s was the era where married couples on TV had twin beds. Today is the era of obvious sex jokes and bleeped and sometimes not bleeped profanity on TV - and nudity on cable.
And a whole channel devoted to food? Sheesh.
I’ll tell you what happens to it: A Communist plot to make us nuke ourselves.
It’s radiation! People have radiation boxes in their homes and they eat the food they expose to so much radiation that it becomes burning in a few minutes. Duck and cover!
The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953, but I doubt many people would have believed that we’d one day resurrect a species by building it back on the molecular level.
Inserting jellyfish genes into rabbits and fish to make them glow.
That’s odd. I’ve never heard another person who purchased a TiVo having had to call customer service to remove pre-programming from their device right after purchasing it.
One thing missing from the thread is a sense of how the difference between 1950 and 1959 is in some ways greater than the difference between 1959 and 2013.
If someone from 1959 appeared today, three words would easily explain most changes in dress, and in culture generally:
The beatniks won.
Explaining this to someone from 1950 would indeed be difficult.
Computers? In 1950, that was a person. In 1959, anyone reading the papers (and almost everyone did) would have read about the invention of the integrated circuit and that this meant ever smaller and cheaper electronics, including electronic brains AKA computers.
Medical care? In 1950, the tax advantages of employee-provided heath care didn’t exist. So most people were uninsured. Prescription drugs? What’s that? You means my friendly pharmacist has a product he won’t sell me? Not in 1950. As for the government approving a drug before it could be sold, that existed, but was to see if the med had known poisons as ingredients, not to see if it was safe and effective. 1959? Except for medicare, the basic pre-Affordable Care Act system of employer-provided insurance, paying for visits to a doctor who gave you a prescription to take to a pharmacist, was in place. And by 1959, what you did if you were sick was about the same as today (except for house calls when the kids were sick). Unlike in 1950, the 1959 pharmacist had meds for conditions like high blood pressure and inflammation, as well as antibiotics affordable even when it wasn’t a life and death situation, and he sold them after getting a prescription.
The zombie apocalypse that is people by the gazillions spending all their time engaged with the device in their hand. Not the devices themselves, but that everywhere you look, people are absorbed with the device even while actively engaged in doing everything from driving to shopping to walking the dog, staring at the phone most all the time. I think the kicker would be discovering they are doing it entirely by their own choice. I seriously think they’d be scratching their heads, even after seeing all that’s on the phone.
“You know Robert Preston’s spoken-word sales-pitch patter in THE MUSIC MAN? It hit #1 on the charts, won the Grammy? Okay, try to stay with me on this…”
Sure, but it wasn’t widespread or even “common.” I remember the first test tube baby was born in 1976 and it was massive news. Gender reassignment is fairly common today - that would be a massive change.
You actually think that snail-mail pen pals relationships are comparable to social media? That in the 1950s, it would be common for people to have hundreds of friends whom they’ve never met, that play the same video games and interact in the same virtual worlds?
I’m aware of the Bath school killings. Listen, nobody’s saying that mass murders didn’t happen in the past. But the idea of young men - boys even - walking into schools and murdering people at random with high capacity assault weapons. I mean, I was born in the 1970s, and Columbine and Sandy Hook are incomprehensible to me. The fact that kids go to school with metal detectors, parents have to go through elaborate processes to fetch their children, and school doors are electronically bolted shut… I think it would throw people from that time for a loop.
Genocide sadly has been part of human society for a long time. But spree shootings in schools and malls aren’t the same.