# What the Hell Was Wrong with People in the 1970's? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 22, 2006, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635 "2006-07-22T22:02:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Dinsdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/97f17d/32.png) [@Dinsdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dinsdale)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635/121 "2006-07-26T16:16:27Z")
Go right ahead and make fun of what we were wearing and living in during the 70s. And while you are at it, think about how much you’d get laid with ready access to the pill, recreational drugs commonplace, and essentially no STDs that couldn’t be handled with a shot of Penicillin. ---
**Author:** ![Rebecca\_DiMwitter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/a87d85/32.png) [@Rebecca\_DiMwitter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rebecca_DiMwitter)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635/122 "2006-07-26T22:03:17Z")
[QUOTE=fetus] Frankly, I’d have to start in 1969 – in Haight-Ashbury, of course. [/QUOTE] I didn’t get to San Francisco until 1976, but it was still pretty cool even then. I understand your desire to be there again in '69. I was a touch too young in ‘69 to have had any real “fun”–my 30-year HS reunion is next weekend (what a thrill that’ll be!). 1974 is when I developed breasts, got music, got drugs (such as they were then), got my first job, got a car…in short, my life changed in many staggering ways in one short summer, and I would SO do that all over again. Even IF it meant living in my parents’ home full of harvest gold appliances, gold shag carpet (we owned a Karpet Rake), and stark white “shot” ceilings (that bumpy look with bits of silver glitter stuck in it all over). I kinda miss my old bedroom with the candy-striped shag carpet and the abstract oversized-daisy-patterned bedspread, frightening tho that would be today… –Beck ---
**Author:** ![samm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/858c86/32.png) [@samm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samm)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635/123 "2006-07-26T22:17:43Z")
Speaking of 70s music and fashions, I just got this in my email from a “friend” the other day: He claims it as: The greatest music video ever. Amazing!!! [![]( " - YouTube") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTKL8MNH95Q) Enjoy. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635/124 "2006-07-26T23:11:37Z")
Semi-Hijack. I found the dividing line between 60’s music & 70’s music, embodied in one song. Title: _The Free Electric Band_. Recorded in the very early 70’s, it’s about a young man in the Peace/Counterculture movement choosing music as a career rather than the Establishment future his parents planned for him. The lyrics are 100% pure 60’s. But the musical arrangement, & the use of other instruments (brass, keyboards) in the backup group, reflects an Earlybird version of the lusher 70’s arrangements. ---
**Author:** ![Hostile\_Dialect](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e495f1/32.png) [@Hostile\_Dialect](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hostile_Dialect)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2006, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635/125 "2006-07-27T06:24:38Z")
> [@Rebecca DiMwitter](#): > > 1974 is when I developed breasts, got music, got drugs (such as they were then), got my first job, got a car…in short, my life changed in many staggering ways in one short summer, and I would SO do that all over again. 2004 for me, basically the same deal. I really wish I’d done it in '74, though! ---
**Author:** ![Hostile\_Dialect](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e495f1/32.png) [@Hostile\_Dialect](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hostile_Dialect)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2006, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635/126 "2006-07-27T06:38:54Z")
Er, without the breasts part. ---
**Author:** ![Khangol](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecae2f/32.png) [@Khangol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khangol)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2006, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635/127 "2006-07-27T15:20:02Z")
[QUOTE=Sam Stone] The internet is about the only real paradigm-shifting technology to come along in all that time. [/QUOTE] I can’t agree with that. The changes in the American (Western/First World) culture over the past 35 years run far deeper than the Internet. For starters, the proliferation of cell phones has changed, and is still changing, many aspects of how people live, by making possible a compulsive and obsessive need to “stay in touch” with everybody, all the time. Television is also enormously changed. Yes, the basic technology of a raster-scanned TV image is still the same, but the explosion of cable and satellite channels, the introduction of 24-hour stations dedicated to everything from cooking to pets to fashion to retro-sitcom reruns of old '70s crap, and most especially the introduction of a multitude of 24-hour “news” and sports channels, have changed the culture dramatically. For one thing, having all those 24-hour channels means having to fill them, which makes “news” and “sports” out of a thousand things that would never have made a newscast or sportscast back when there were only a few channels and a few hours per day devoted to those things. People’s perceptions of what constitutes news have changed, and the “news junkie” has become an entire new subspecies of _homo-Americanus_. Likewise the sports nuts. Though they always existed, the change in TV has enabled them to turn their habit from coffee to crack. Throw in the DVR/TiVo devices that let you record and store whatever you like from all those channels, and the idea of the home theater, in which the individual has complete control over what to watch, and how much, how often, and when, changes “watching TV” as it was in the '70s as much as cars changed the notion of transportation. It becomes entirely personal, and available at whim. Computers have had a large effect on how people live, particularly young people. I don’t mean the PC, so much, which is really used by most people primarily for the Internet anyway (although there is certainly a large subculture of music and photo and video buffs out there, not to mention the whole porn explosion the Web has made possible - but that’s also Internet related). By “computers”, I mean the microprocessors and software that are everywhere, in everything. Our cars. Our phones. Our appliances. How many hours have typical under-thirty youngsters today spent playing video games? What were youngsters in 1970 doing with all those hours growing up? (Not to mention all the additional hours they spend in front of the television. Yes, I know, kids and teens and tweens and twenty-whatevers spent huge amounts of time in front of the tube in the '70s as well. But they didn’t have nearly as much to feed their jones: VCRs weren’t really around yet, DVDs didn’t exist, and even in the late '70s, when cable began making real inroads into homes, there were still only 20 or 30 channels in most markets, and many of those were basically duplicates of the big broadcast networks.) Portable music libraries are another major area of change, and serve to emphasize the entire “what you want, where and when you want it” mentality that is becoming so prevalent. In 1970 “portable music” meant a transistor radio, or at most a “miniature” (by today’s standards, large and bulky) cassette tape player, which essentially meant listening to what was being programmed for you. Beginning with the introduction of the early Walkman and various clones, continuing through the Discman, and now into the iPod era, this has revolutionized the way people take their music. Satellite radio is also a significant new technology, though I don’t think it will ultimately have nearly the same effect as the pocket-sized recording library. All of these technologies accustom people to the same basic concept: You can have, hear, watch, experience what you want, when you want it. People are becoming so used to the idea of personal choice in everything, all the time, that it shocks them when they can’t have it. Cultural and social attitudes have changed remarkably in the past 35 years, largely because people, as always, take for granted the newest and latest technology that permeates every aspect of their lives. I also don’t agree that the average Joe on the street had any grand visions of the year 2000. My personal observation of the average Joe (or Jane) on the street, in any era, in the '50s, ‘70s or today, is that if you ask them what life will be like thirty years from now, they’ll probably stare vacantly, drooling slightly, and then say "Uh . . . I dunno. Prolly be differ’nt I guess. . . . Maybe flyin’ cars er sumthin. . . ." Few people in 1972 were awed by men on the moon, or gave a shit when the whole program was scrapped early, with two more missions still on the drawing board. “Closed due to lack of interest” basically describes the entire American space program since 1971. People are far more interested in American Idol than developing a space-faring society. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2006, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635/128 "2006-07-27T16:04:51Z")
[QUOTE=Sam Stone] Yeah. That condition is called ‘work’. It’s damned near terminal. Anyway, you’re right about what I meant. In the 70’s, we were all sure that we were heading into ‘the future’, and it was going to be radically different. If you asked anyone on the street what the year 2000 would look like, you would have gotten lots of different answers - but most of them would have predicted radical changes. Who would have guessed that in the 2000’s we’d be building retro muscle cars and making Brady Bunch movies? That we wouldn’t even be capable of going back to the moon, and we would still drive basically the same cars, watch the same televisions, and wear the same jeans and T-shirts they wore in 1940? The internet is about the only real paradigm-shifting technology to come along in all that time. But that sense of an impending strange future also pretty much true of the the 50’s and 60’s, too. It was a time of massive change - pre-WWII, the U.S. was still mostly agrarian, cars were still fairly new, and biplanes ruled the skies. Lots of people were old enough to remember a time when there were no airplanes or even cars. But the 50’s saw the construction of the interstate highway system, launching the first men into space, supersonic jets, the rise of television, the birth of the ‘teenager’ class. It was a tremendous amount of change in a very short period of time, and it culminated in 1969 with man landing on the moon. The 70’s were a reflection of that. That, plus the boomer kids who grew up in those years of incredible change were now moving out and setting up their own houses and making their mark in the world - a truly ugly mark, but a mark nonetheless. Plus, there were a lot of drugs. [/QUOTE] What’s a "paradigm shift’-do we still have them? Waht are the symptoms? :eek: ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2006, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635/129 "2006-07-27T17:18:03Z")
Any predictions on what people will think of black and stainless steel kitchens in thirty years? I’d wager that this generation’s “harvest gold” is that “butter yellow” that seems to be all the rage to paint kitchens in. “Terra cotta” seems to be taking the place of the orange. Speaking of harvest gold… My mother’s kitchen had a harvest gold Solarian floor, and the soffit area above the cabinets was painted harvest gold. The cabinets were medium-dark brown, as were the appliances. Net effect was a broad swath of dark brown flanked by that dirty yellow. bleah Somewhere back on page 1, someone mentioned appliances only being available in white, harvest gold or avocado back then. Well, guess what? Pop into Sears, and you’ll still find only three color choices, but now it’s white, almond/bisque and stainless. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-wrong-with-people-in-the-1970s/365635.md?page=6)