The mainstreaming of dating services. When I was younger, dating services/personal ads/etc were considered kind of wierd, and if you met your husband/wife through those means, people were surprised.
Nowadays, it’s pretty accepted and not too many people think it’s unusual at all. I have several married friends who met this way. I pointed it out to my wife who was musing whether there were really a lot of people using eharmony or match.com, and I mentioned well x and y met online, and so did a and z (names changed to letters for my own personal amusement), so I think it’s pretty common now.
Nowdays it’s “gay” to be naked with other boys for any reason (unless a girl is present). I never showered after gym or actually saw anybody else shower. We did have showers, but only some of the sports teams would use them after practice. Football and basketball players would (mostly the same guys) and I think the wrestlers had to shower before practice. Otherwise the “rules” were never take your underwear off or have both shirt and pants off at the same time. Besides nowdays most kids don’t do enough in gym to actually need to shower.
Digital video and still cameras, and the proliferation of videos and images online.
For some reason, it absolutely flabbergasts me that every single ad for computers these days (that is targeted at the mainstream) basically plays up the use of the machine for digital video and photos. So do broadband internet provider ads.
Even around here, when people ask for advice on buying new computers and say what they want to do with the machines, it’s “oh…email, word processing, web browsing, storing lots of photos and videos.”
Really?
All of a sudden - or so it seems to me - EVERYONE is a video producer, and everyone is a photographer. And they’ve all got really good gear!
And I am seriously, seriously behind in this revolution with my .001 megapixels and no video camera in sight.
This surprises me also. Last summer, when liquids were banned on aircraft, news programs showed people almost panicking because they couldn’t bring their own bottled water with them on the plane. I was surprised at how important always having a personal bottle of water seemed to be to people.
As kids, we also went hours between drinks of water, sometimes days; because frankly, we all found water to be kind of plain and blah. There were other liquids we preferred to drink instead, and most often did. And later, as adults, our liquid intake expanded to include such things as coffee and alcohol. But a lack of soda, juice, beer, or coffee was never a problem if we got thirsty, because drinking fountains, kitchen taps, and even such things as garden hoses (as kids, drinking from the garden hose was always a fun thing to do) were plentiful enough if we just had to drink something. That was when we drank water–when we got thirsty and nothing else was available. But we never carried a bottle of it always.
Hang around the desks for a couple of hours…a hundred people per flight, a dozen flights an hour (both low estimates), it won’t take long to find an individual who will have a particular problem, either real or psychological, about not having water with them. Guess who the news crews will focus on.
The modern openness about sex and the ever-skimpier outfits worn by young women (both of which trends I heartily welcome). Back when I was in college, AIDS was new and terrifying; everyone expected it would start cutting a swath through the heterosexual population any day now. Pundits predicted a latter-day Victorianism.
Except people are–or at least pretend to be, which is the same thing–a lot more prudish now than they were 10 years ago.
Back in the late 70s people were predicting hard core porn on broadcast television in a few years, the destruction of the family, orgies, pansexuality, and so on.
Didn’t happen. While people are more accepting and open about some sexual practices, they’re a lot more prudish about others. Clothes for men, for instance. Profanity on TV and the radio. Sure, the profanity thing is being imposed by a vocal minority, but the point is that we’re listening to the vocal minority. Remember when just about every movie that wasn’t marketed to kids had gratuitous toplessness?
On the other hand, internet porn trumps everything, I suppose.
I’m only 21 and I think guys look stupid wearing “swimsuits” that go past their knees. It’s always a shock to me to watch movies or TV set 20+ years ago and seeing guys wearing shorts that would be considered underwear today.
It’s just so much easier nowadays, that I could not imagine watching my daughter grow with a film camera. There’s just something about seeing your pictures on the little screen after you take them. Plus the convenience of 1-gig cards, Photoshop adjustments, and then selecting only the best pics to send or print yourself.
Even SLRs are so automated as to become mainstream. Before, only professionals or dedicated hobbyists used SLRs. Now, you can get one at Costco and think you’re ready to become a wedding photographer.
The demonization of smoking is a good example and one that’s been on my mind lately as my place of employment is going 100% no smoking. I’m guessing that future generations will be watching old movies with all the smoking digitally edited out.
The whole “internet” thing is a shock to me, and I’ve been around since you had to know Unix to do anything. Nobody predicted the total intrusion into our lives, and I mean that in the nice way. When even TV starts showing the neat stuff online, you know things are different.
I was born in 1973 and grew up in the 1980’s. It was is a much underappreciated period in its bleakness and hellishness. I don’t mean that personally or on a micro scale. I mean that everyone told us very seriously that our towns and cities were going to degenerate into urban warfare anarchy and decay while the Japanese invaded us economically because we were so pathetic educationally and our work ethic was poor.
That was the positive outlook. The negative outlook was that Soviet Russia could have nuclear warheads over the North Pole into the continental U.S. within 30 minutes at any given time. The supposedly deterrent strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction meant that all of the U.S. and much of the globe could end within less than 1 hours notice starting any time. Declassified Soviet documents revealed that the world almost ended on September 26, 1983 but the Colonel in charge refused orders to start WWIII binging the movies of the same year like War Games to very near reality.
We were told this stuff at an almost daily rate. Movies like The Day After told us what it would be like when nuclear annihilation came. Other movies showed us what the Japanese would be like as our economic overlords. We also got to see what would happen as gangs took over our cities and middle-class people fled in fear leading to complete decay.
What I am leading up to is the absolute surprise that happened in the mid-1990’s and continues to this day. Everything turned around seemingly by itself and most of these threats went poof or at least into remission. The Golden Period continues to this day although many people seem to have a memory blockage of the horrors of previous decades.
The backlash against this was in full swing by the mid-80s, with the Meese Commission on one side of the political spectrum and the anti-porn, Andrea Dworkin brand of feminism (whose raison d’etre seemed to be to make straight guys feel ashamed to feel desire for women) on the other.
If that was the 70s, I was too young to see that kind of movies then.
I agree on this one. Look at New York City. I visited a couple years ago. I was riding the subway from Greenwich Village to Times Square at 10pm. I walked from Times Square to the Algonquin right after a show. We were strolling around Central Park as sunset approached.
We never once felt threatened. In fact, at all times, the areas and subways were teeming with people just like us (our age and demographic). Even at the Port Authority bus terminal.
Paris Hilton and sex tapes and everyone seeing up people’s skirts with no underwear takes me by surprise. If you’d asked me in 1992 what the girls of the future were going to be like, I really honestly thought they would look back at the 1992 video hos and laugh at them. I think around 1992 was when Tracy Lords was so negative about having been in porn and she had really had to work hard to make a name for herself seperate from it. I never would have imagined that some day girls would wish that everyone would see them naked or think it was a distinction if people wanted to fuck them. In 1992 it was a given and somewhat of a nuisance that everyone wanted to fuck you.
Not that all girls do at all, but just the image of young women in the media is not what I thought it would be.
The huge demographic rise of the Hispanic population in the US and the attendant cultural changes it brought. When I was a kid (not that long ago – I’m 26) the US still seemed very much a black and white nation, racially speaking: there was a kind of tangential awareness of Asians and Latinos, but blacks and whites were historically the two big groups (racially, and arguably culturally) and for all I knew it would always be that way. I knew very few Hispanics, never saw Hispanics on TV or in the movies, don’t remember hearing or seeing the Spanish language when out and about, wasn’t taught basic Spanish in grade school (we learned French – doubt that would happen much today) or from my childhood media (ala “Dora the Explorer”), didn’t hear anything more Latino on the radio than Richie Valens, and going to a Mexican restaurant still felt a bit like eating “foreign food.”
All of that changed at some point – I hear spoken Spanish at least once or twice a week, see written Spanish somewhere almost every day, eat salsa more often than ketchup, hear that Hispanics are now the biggest minority group (and growing), etc. etc. Late night comedy shows [Conan O’Brien in this instance] can do parodies of Latin-American soap operas in basic Spanish with the assumption that most viewers will understand it – and be right! I’ve never had a Spanish class in my life, but I still understood every word, just picking it up by osmosis.
I’m not saying this positively or negatively or critically or uncritically or anything else – just something I never would have expected or forseen while I was growing up. And of course, maybe all this was going on when I was a kid, but I just wasn’t aware because I was a stupid kid or because of the places I was raised. Who knows.
