Exapno_Mapcase:
Yeah, the times were different. History wasn’t recorded and available in full as we expect it to be. You saw a movie when it was released, and maybe in a revival, but probably not. You heard a radio program when it was released, and then maybe on a summer rerun but probably not. You read a magazine, and then threw it away and one story of a hundred got reprinted in an anthology. You bought a mystery, but probably waited until you could get a cheap dollar hardback reprint, which fell apart on reading, or went to the book rental section of the pharmacy and paid four cents for a week. You didn’t have all the books at hand to reread. Paperbacks started changing that in the 1940s, as every major mystery got reprinted, but that took a decade or more and those got tossed or passed around or donated to the troops.
Culture lived in a perpetual “now.” Popular culture had no history at all. It was disposable in a very literal way. You consumed it and then forgot it. Even in the 60s my keeping every book I bought was a weird idiosyncrasy. I literally knew no one who did that beside me until I got to college. There was no history of 50s music in the early years of The Beatles. We knew nothing that we hadn’t heard that very morning. It was all rediscovered later when nostalgia got invented.
This brew of all popular culture existing simultaneously is one of the biggest changes since I was a kid. It went from unimaginable to omnipresent. Now, of course, we think it was like that always. It’s utterly bizarre.
A few months back I was talking with one of my nephews about TV shows and we were talking about shows we had watched as kids. And I realized he was talking about the same shows I was despite being half my age. Some of the shows he had grown up watching had been off the air years before he was born. I pointed out to him that he was feeling nostalgic for my childhood.