I knew a few people like this in the 1990’s. They were fine with watching the same exact movies on VHS, though…
My parents, who had 8 tracks, cassettes, and records, complained about whatever i used that wasn’t those three.
Umm, you do know that they were right, don’t you? 
And that it is even MORE true today!
Back then (1920?) they probably thought that the phone user was just being rude. Today, we know that the (cell) phone user is not just being rude, he is endangering lives.*
hmm…there’s an old French saying about the more things change…
*and not just when driving…Walking, too.
Do a youtube search for “cell phone walking accidents”
They were correct, but it was not ultimately a sensible complaint. That was my point.
I thought it was established that it’s not the cell phone but the talking that is the causal factor–that personal non-phone conversations in the car are just as dangerous.
I never walk while using a cell phone. When I walk, it’s the people around me who are using them. I have never, not even once, had a collision, or even, that I remember, a close call.
Since I am one of the older generation I look back at the country , or world and people have never been perfect. The same things that go on today show that people have always had complaints about other generations. There was a lot of things that years ago were kept secret. Reporters didn’t write about. There was very little talk about the news, most was just printed with out comment. The main way people heard of things was in the news paper and the radio, If one looks back several thousand of years they were not any better then, if it was, then there would be no need for the 10 commandments.
Now there is news from around the world at one’s finger tips.
There is a lot more Crime, but the population is also a great deal larger.
We no let children see Eek cave.
Eek draw boy mastodon play leapfrog girl mastodon.
Yes, same here.
Of course, I grew up in a rural area. I was even critisized by a college professor for “studying too much”.
I can’t find a link, but I remember running across a story about a Medieval English priest giving a sermon condemning the use of forks. Could be apocriphal, but I enjoy it.
They do… but the question is whether that’s a bad thing overall.
I mean, I’m not in the habit of having a day planner or anything beyond a sketchy to-do list, because I did try the day planner thing back years ago in college, and while it was excellent as long as I had it, when I left it somewhere or worse, lost it, I had NO idea what was coming up, what my appointments were, and was totally left in the lurch.
I found for me it was better to just remember everything; for me, the important stuff does get remembered immediately, and the less important stuff eventually burbles to the surface after the important things are taken care of. I don’t forget anything, and I’m not at the mercy of some dumb little notebook to remember things for me.
On a larger scale… people memorize the Koran, but printing it means that ANYONE able to read can have their own copy. Same thing for Homer’s plays.
Pin-ball machines.
Some of my relatives belong to a church that forbids TV and movies. Radio is okay as long as you listen to the right stations. (Which unfortunately includes the usual wingnut shows.)
The Internet became a huge issue for them. They eventually split over it. One group was okay with it, the other forbade it. One of my relatives loves her Internet but unfortunately her local church went with the anti group. For a while she used it in her RV only, since it wasn’t technically in her house but then even that was ruled out. (You could use it for work, etc. But not at home.)
So the group that thinks the Internet is okay, how do they feel about Internet radio or TV shows? I assume there must be some restrictions on those.
Peter Griffin: “Oh my god, they’ve invented the movable type printing press! We can’t let the peasants know or they’ll revolt!”
Oral tradition is also notoriously unreliable, though. It’s why we have 5000 versions of a lot of myths and legends (and many myths and legends about the same guys that are mutually contradictory). When something is written down it’s subject to some drift, but it’s also generally a lot more static than oral tradition.
Sure, some things like math and logic may remain relatively constant because of their a priori nature, but without writing I’m pretty sure history would be even more comically misunderstood than it is now.
And, of course, they did.
There is no need to speculate about this. You are undoubtedly right. Anthropologists have found consistently that cultures that do not have the technology of writing have virtually no conception of their history. They may have some vague oral tradition “memory” of things that happened 3 or 4 generations or so ago, but beyond that everything soon fades into myth, and stories not of people but of gods and mythical, magical hero-figures.
Incidentally, such societies also have only the most rudimentary understanding of math and logic, both of which probably depend on writing even more than history does to be able to develop past a very primitive stage. The people of some (not all) pre-literate cultures can count beyond three. Maybe in some they can do simple addition and maybe even simple subtraction. I don’t think it gets much beyond that (and maybe not that far). Once we had writing, though, math developed rapidly. Logic, as a formal study, took a little longer still.
I read somewhere (I think it’s supposed to be a Chinese proverb) that “the palest ink is better than the sharpest memory.”
Good sir, are you perchance asserting that Our Lord Abaraham Washington did not, in fact, deliver the negro from the redcoated Nazis across the Delaware? That he did not fly the kite with a key attached? That he and his brother Thomas Revere did not shout a warning that the Japanese were coming on their famous three week journey after playing key roles in aiding the heroes Lee and Patton against the Confederacy? That they did not inspire John McCartney and the AC/DCs to revolutionize music as we know it?
Blasphemy.
Like I said, they do listen to radio, as long as it’s not “evil” stuff. Non-religious music, Howard Stern, etc. So a similar thing applies to the Internet (for the sub-sect that allows it). Religious, work, mainstream news, etc. But I suspect my aunt played a lot of games, which is a no-no in many cases. (They could play, for example, backgammon, but the dice were taken away and trashed. Replaced by a spinner which somehow was okay. Religious rules can be … inexplicable.)
It’s like books. The Bible is okay. Fifty Shades of Gray, not so much. Why this rule applies to books and radio but not TV or movies is beyond me.