A co-worker and I were just talking about the time we spend browsing through Netflix paralyzed by the choices and not getting to actually watching anything. And how you used to go out to the video store and yeah you’d browse for a while but eventually you’d make a few choices and go home and watch the movies!
:eek: You’re from New Jersey, so you know, “we were the wildest, the wildest things we’d ever seen”! Long live the 80s!
Yep I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more time browsing and adding to my queue than I have actually watching Netflix.
Here’s my take on the 1980s (the first four years of which I spent in college):
Electronics went from the Atari 2600, or, if you had $2000 or so to throw around, an Apple II, to PCs, Macs, and “is that a computer with 1 MB of memory!?” Connection speeds, however, were incredibly slow - even if 2400 baud modems existed by 1990, that’s still over an hour just to download a 1 MB file. Graphics weren’t much better; it wasn’t until late in the 1980s when you could have more than 16 colors on the screen at once, and even then, it was only 320 x 240.
Television went from “sitcoms are dead” to “sitcoms are alive,” thanks mainly to three words: The. Cosby. Show. Also, this is when national cable stations came into play; before then, cable TV existed primarily to give you a better picture of your local stations and to include some from nearby, yet still out of antenna range, cities. In 1980, I had 12 cable channels; in 1990, it was 40, and that was small compared to some other cities.
However, the “gamechanger,” in my opinion, was the growth of the VCR. No more having to choose between two shows that are on at the same time.
I’m not sure this is an 80s thing. It’s more of a thing particular to a high school.
Yeah, I don’t think so.
It’s interesting how many people are describing the 80s as a great time, because AT THE TIME people felt about it pretty much the way they always have, convinced their problems were unique in human history.
Of course, when in the 80s are we talking? Things were not so good in 1983, when the unemployment rate was above 10 percent and the Cold War was as hot as it had been in twenty years. Six years later, unemployment was down and Communism was falling apart. 1989 looked pretty good.
So did 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988.
Regards,
Shodan
I was wondering about that myself. My recollection was pretty much the opposite, but perhaps I just transitioned to hanging around less racist people. But it’s the last time I really heard the word “nigger” thrown fairly casually about by white people I knew. At least then you knew pretty much right away who the racists were, I suppose.
I grew up in an upper middle classish area on the east coast. People were unflinchingly racist but not in such overt ways as you describe. Racism was just thought of differently back then - nobody would have considered themselves racist. The bar was much higher than it is now to be considered racist.
I’m amazed at the response to my comment that racism was less overt in the 80s than today.
So, let me clarify - I am speaking about the last year or two, not the whole thirty or so years in between, and I didn’t mean that people were less racist in general, but that people would have been shunned for saying some of things that are common today.
I don’t know if people were more or less racist, but I know they hid it better.
At least where I was. At the personal level - I don’t know about salaries or professional advancement, NONE of my friends were well paid.
As to the example given, well, people in knew did not use the word “nigger”, and I don’t recall hearing it often IRL.
I did, too. But still hear it from those same people. In my case, mostly middle class and lower middle class. Mostly, but not exclusively, rural. And around “in group” people.
I grew up in a working/middle class neighborhood, so that may be part of it. At least now, most of the people I know that would use those kinds of terms keep it in check, or hide behind euphemisms like “Democrats” or even “Canadians” (though it’s been awhile since I heard the latter.)
Again, I just don’t think so, sorry. No, people did not hide it better; I honestly think you are viewing the past through rose colored glasses.
Obviously the shape of racism was different in a lot of ways, but among decent people today I honestly think there’s less casual, overt racism. For one thing, people for whom racist words and comments were just the way they were raised - my sweet Grandma thought to use the word “Jew” as a verb meaning “to bargain” or “to scam” was just fine - are mostly dead now. The use of racist jokes amongst white people, with each other, was considered acceptable back then. Hey, as long as you weren’t hurting anyone’s feelings, right? Today I don’t know a single person who would tell me a racist joke. I haven’t heard one in forever. If my kids told a racist joke I’d ground them for a month.
People who would use ethnic slurs today are the same ones who’d have used them in the 1980s.
Where I lived the girls all seemed to be named Sue or Pam or Laura. Then I went to junior high and met girls named Vandana or Viji or Charul or Indira. They became my friends, which by and large the Sue/Pam/Laura crowd hadn’t been.
Computer class consisted of me going to a room once a week and having the teacher (a man) tell us it was a waste of time for me to be there, as girls couldn’t learn computers. (So I learned about them in college, from my now husband.)
On the other hand, people openly support racist immigration policies now.
We grew up in different subcultures. The only people I knew to use “jew down” were my Jewish relatives who loved to make the goyim spit out their non-Kosher wine. People would say “nig-ger” instead of “nigga” when the term came up in conversation until the phrase “the N-word” rescued them. They never adopted the euphemisms “urban” or “ethnic”, but understood the difference between colored person and person of color.
Would they hold their purses a little more tightly on public transportation when a crew of young black men boarded the bus? Probably. Would they locked the car doors when driving through “certain neighborhoods”? Yeah, probably. Did they deep down think some people had more natural rhythm? Of course.
But for me the 80s was like a transition period, between “racism is wrong” and “we need to talk about race”.
Tell me it’s not worse today.
My teenage years were spent in the 80s and it was an awesome decade to grow up in. Even though videogames were 8-bit they were awesome and we only cared about the gameplay, not the graphics. Being able to bring home a movie to watch on VCR was a HUGE deal. Being able to tape your favorite TV show was incredible. Thank god for VCRs. The music was innovative and awesome, and going to a record store to seek out your favorite artist and sometimes it was hard to find because it was an import and you didn’t have the money to special order the record made finding a cassette of that artist so much more rewarding. Pro wrestling was still broken up into territories. You could do fucked up things with your hair and still get a reaction. Malls were still a thing. Concert tickets maxed out at $17. We were still hoping for a Led Zeppelin reunion. Notes were snuck to fellow classmates, not texts. The best talk radio station in the area talked politics and social issues, not sports.
The bad: HIV was an automatic death sentence and we all lived in deathly grave fear of it; we were all convinced we were going to die in a nuclear war with the USSR at any time (I get it still is but at least we and Russia are trade partners now); cars were shit; Buffalo wings were not a thing yet; the NHL was not on national TV and the NBA finals were on tape delay; bullying was totally accepted in many schools as part of the growing process
OK, it’s not worse today. Or at least in my observation among my various peer groups.
You believe they didn’t in the 80s?
It isn’t. Not even close.
I have to agree with Crafter_Man. Rotary phones were on their way out (and were almost non-existent in the ‘80s). A lot of my friends’ parents had push-button phones in the '70s and most people had cable in the '70s.
The different perspectives on the state of the world are funny though. I had just joined the military in the late '70s, just before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had happened. I remember sailing in the north Atlantic being overflown by Soviet Bear-D maritime patrol aircraft and being shadowed by Krivak frigates. Then, towards the end of the '80s Mikhael Gorbachev took over and, for me, the feeling of optimism was just incredible. The Berlin Wall fell, Ceaușescu and his wife were executed in Romania and it just seemed like all the crap was ending. Sadly, things didn’t quite work out that way.
I remember girls with big hair, and the hip people wore jackets with the sleeves partly rolled up and their collars turned up.
In the military, desktop computers were just entering the office in the late '80s and cell phones were starting to show up on the street, but were often regarded as a sign of sheer arrogance. In fact I remember seeing, in a dollar store in Montreal, a fake cell phone kit (as a joke thing), complete with a curly antenna you could stick to your car to show everyone how important you were (http://autoweek.com/article/wait-theres-more/1987-fake-cellphone-antenna-your-car-made-you-look-high-roller).
I do look back on those years fondly, though.
Beautifully stated and incredibly important. Nowadays nobody has time. For anything. Including digesting news events. It’s kind of an obvious food analogy.
CNN went on the air on June 1, 1980. So fair to say the nascent bits of a 24-hour news cycle were there. Nightline started on November 8th, 1979. But for the most part, people ingested news in a manner and at a speed similar to how they had for the preceding decades. They had time to digest/ ponder/ discuss/ absorb the news of the day. We’re not talking the Pony Express. Just a somewhat less frantic pace than now.
Access to news aside, the lack of real-time electronic connections meant some things that were much more socially profound. Unless you were quite rich, use of a telephone for maintenance of long-distance relationships ( intimate and otherwise ) was out. Those of us of a certain age do remember Nighttime and Weekend reduced long-distance rates. 
Therefore, proximity DID define tribal groupings. Even if you were an avid letter-writer like me.
You graduate from High School and go off to College. The odds were very very good that 90+ % of your social groupings, your tribe from “childhood”, would rapidly ebb away, replaced with new groupings defined by your new locale and new experiences. As a young adult, making new friends and connections was primary to existence. In school or out, moving away from home town or not, just being exposed to other groups of people altered your outlook.
You also learned, slowly, that filtering and letting go of some old connections was healthy and okay to do.
I’m 55, was 18 in the summer of 1980. My kids are 27 and 26. THEY grew up into a social paradigm wholly dominated by real-time selective electronic connections: Text Messaging. When they left for College, they took their entire social tribe with them. Radically different way of learning to be with new people than anything anyone on the planet has lived through prior to Smart Phones. I’m not criticizing, I’m just saying that it’s a fundamental shift. And in the 1980’s, none of that was possible.
Personally, the 1980’s were filled with rich experiences. College, finding entrée into my chosen field, getting married for the first time, etc. To stay in touch with friends and lovers, I took fountain pen in hand, sat at a sheet of nice quality paper, and wrote letters. Tons and tons and tons of letters. A lost art.
As far as popular culture and technology? Great stuff !! Watched the very first Space Shuttle touch down. ( And a few years later, watched the immolation of the Challenger 
). Sat in my buddy’s parents’ house in Philly a few weeks after working on my first Billy Joel music video ( “Tell Her About It”) and watching it debut on M.T.V. Heh heh.
Cutting college to sit in the house we were renting in Mt. Vernon, NY ALL DAY LONG in an effort to roll over an Atari video came we were all hooked on. Defender, perhaps? I did roll the score over. It took almost all day and when my housemates got back from their school, they were might amused to see me there.
The decade was neatly bracketed for me. I started in 1980 still in High School and finished in 1989 working on the adoption application papers for my first son. So, in many ways, I finished growing up in that decade.
Mostly.
Yep, I still pay a lot of bills by check, it is a minor task that gives me a feeling of satisfation.
MTV was born. They played Music Videos 24 hours a day. First couple of years they didnt have enough so you saw Karma Cameleon and *I want my MTV *every hour.
VCRs were expensive. Movies on VHS were expensive. But you could rent cheaply. Or buy a leftover rental. A lot of people had their VCRs blinking 12:00.
Ronald Reagan was President.
It was still common to graduate college and get a career job for decades. With a real pension.