I was born in 1970. I am fascinated by the previous decade, that being the the 60,s. Not just the music, but everything…films, culture, books, lifestyle and the celebrities. I look back on a time when I didnt even exist with great fondness and warmth, but obviously I am just being influenced by other peoples memories, right? I know we have great things today, like the internet, DVD, mobile phones etc, but we dont really need them do we? Does anyone ever wish they were born at a different time? Or if you had a time machine…where would you go? Is modern life rubbish, or am I just a fool for nostalgia? There is so much information flying about these days, but is it all relevant and useful, like do I really want to know who Kate Moss is dating?
Hindsight is always more interesting than the present. Having come of age in the '70’s, I gotta wonder…do you really find Gary Glitter, T. Rex, the first wave of platform shoes & bell-bottoms worthy of fond nostalgia?
I agree; others’ memories will evoke the warm fuzzy feeling of a generation. Do I care about Kate Who? No, I don’t own a TV, this insulates me from a lot of extraneous nonsense I don’t care about. I like the convenience of my cell phone, I enjoy the internet, I like the engineering of new cars. Rubbish? Not at all.
Your question(s) are a little diffuse…I can’t think of a time I woul go back, or forward to. I enjoy this one~it’s complicated, and fun, enough!
Dave man, I know what you mean. I was born in the 80s…okay, '84 (you all know my age here), and I still have nostalgia for the previous decades, primarily the sixties. Stuff like the civil rights movement, and the counterculture, and the music and whatnot…gets to me. Though I didn’t go through it, I feel close to it. Probably its the media…and watching VH1. But still.
I still doubt it was all like that. I mean, in some ways the sixties isn’t too different from the nineties, except that we have the internet. That is, there are some fundamental things about people that don’t change. And I’m sure for them, day to day life wasn’t the exciting stuff we see on the film reels and all. It’s just nicer to look back, though, and pretend it was the way you wanted it to be. There are so many ways of looking at it. That is, for example, take the fifties- you can look at it as a time of conformity (“suburbia”, the Red Scare, traditionalism, conservatives, that sort of thing), or a time of rebellion (beatnik culture, R&B music, and all). Just as there’s no way to define the decade we know as the '90s. People in the future may find us funny, or stupid, or fun…in turns.
okay that got off tangent a bit, but to answer the question directly, there are aspects of Modern Life that are rubbish, but its hard for us to subjectively judge our own era. “Good” and “bad” things happened. If you judge us solely on the election and Eminem music, then we look bad…but there’s a lot of other stuff too.
I agree that there are more unnecessary bits of info floating aorund out there now than there used to be. I think this is the reason some people get so nostalgic for the '60’s-there was less competition for your time and attention back then. I think it’s too difficult to say if things are better or worse now. We should just say they’re “different”, and leave it at that. The Internet has made a lot of people better informed than they used to be, but it hasn’t actually given them more power to affect event. So now instead of blissful ignorance, we have frustrated enlightenment. Is this better? Who can say?
But in the sixties, they didn’t have Cecil Adams to eradicate ignorance. One thing to remember. 
All of the great music of the 60s sounded like absolute shite on the car stereos of the time. Motown used to test their recordings on a beat-up mono car speaker to see if it would “take.”
The best dope in the 60s was less powerful than the schwaggiest dirtweed of today (about 2-5% THC by weight then as opposed to 5-15% or more now). LSD, on the other hand, was traditionally administered in 400 microgram doses–enough to melt a casual user’s brain.
Very crappy things happened in the 60s. King, X, two Kennedys, and a host of others were assassinated publicly. Racism and organized crime ran rampant. Revolution appeared to be just over the horizon, if the damned Commies didn’t get us first. And then there was the draft and the prospect of having to serve in a hated war and come home scorned by your own people.
You might have had the chance to meet Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, or Jimi Hendrix. More likely, you would have the chance to listen to both kinds of music, Country and Western, and possibly meet Mel Tillis–fresh out of prison.
And, as Zoggie mentioned, if you wanted to learn about Turkish rocketeers, you might be lucky enough to have a library in your town, whereupon the interlibrary loan process might get you what you’re interested in after a few weeks or months.
Now? Five minutes and a prayer with the SDMB search engine.