The mainstreaming of porn and the proliferation of movies which regard graphic rape, torture and murder as though they are some sort of wonderful art form.
How the hell do you put a dime in an iPod?
…and how in hell do I get my vinyl record albums to fit in that tiny circle?
I can watch almost any movie ever made, any time I want, from the comfort of my own home?
The Hayes Code doesn’t dictate what Hollywood can and can’t produce anymore?
Nifty!
Reality television.
The commercial arms race to capture a moment of our attention in an age of increasing desensitization has created a frenetic, pervasive audio-visual blitzkrieg. The sheer volume of advertising would seem obscene. Movies and TV would be way too complicated, crude, weird, and fast-paced. Music would be too loud, fast, and discordant. The culture would seem tainted with a smug, self-mocking sarcasm, as if we’re all aware of the garish extravagance of our media, but since we’re powerless to stop it, we can only smirk at it.
It seems perfectly normal for those of us born into it, but a '50s era Rip Van Winkle would go into major culture shock, and probably never recover.
The whole “throw-away” society. Not just disposable arts, as mentioned by panache45, but disposable diapers, meals, cars, appliances, jobs, soldiers, marriages, children. It just seems like people don’t value stuff like they used to.
The shocking lack of flying cars, robot butlers, and mylar clothing.
Manatee, laugh!
You stole mine. Being a movie buff from a young age, I’d read of movie moguls and huge stars having home theaters with a projectionist and weep with envy, dreaming about having my own home theater and private movie stash. Now I have a home theater and over 1500 DVDs in a space that would hold only a few movies in their film cannisters. I can watch just about any movie I want to. If I don’t own it, I can go around the corner and rent it. Strangely enough though, at this point in my life I still go to the theater more than I watch movies at home.
The world being run by DAMN DIRTY APES!
Heh, I don’t even have to get my lazy ass off the sofa and go out to rent a movie. I just press a few buttons on the Magic Remote and the New-Fangled Cable brings it right into my TV.
If I fell asleep in 1999 and woke up today, I would be surprised at how little rock music has changed in the past 8 years. I don’t think there’s a single 8-year period of rock music history in which so little has changed.
Basically the only change has been the continued popularity of emo, and emo-derived music starting to worm its way inextricably into “regular” rock music, along with the gradual decline of the popularity of nu-metal and nu-metal-derived music.
But this wasn’t really a revolution like:
– Original explosion of Rock N Roll
– British Invasion
– Psychedelia
– Punk
– okay, New Wave wasn’t really a revolution. I guess 1979-1992 was sort of a stale period musically too.
– Grunge
I’d also be surprised that while R+B and Rap are still the dominant pop music, and maybe even grown in popularity in the past 8 years, their popularity vis a vis rock hasn’t changed all that much, nor is there a new genre that has arisen to take away share from them.
Price is Right and Jeopardy are still on.
The biggie for me would be the “fragmentation”, if you will, of media.
You mean there’s a channel that’s dedicated solely to SPORTS?
That’s not all, old man. . .there’s a channel devoted solely to GOLF and a channel devoted solely to AUTO RACING.
Along with 24 hour news, 24 hour music, 24 hour movies.
But, I don’t know if Rip would like it or not like. It sort of just crept up on the rest of us.
I also think the ability to watch movies from home in pretty high quality, both sound and picture-wise, would be a nice revelation.
A society that demands zero tolerance for bullying in school at the same time keeps the Sopranos at the top of the ratings pile. Talk about your mixed messages. :dubious:
I could never have guessed that women’s liberation would have led to all pop singers and actresses dressing and acting like strippers in stage shows and videos. Want us to take your talent as a singer seriously? Stop with the bumping, grinding, and porno shots.
And the proliferation of big/dangerous dogs in urban cores. WT…?
I would agree-the glorification of vulgarity and crudeness-the sloppy mode of dress, sloppy language, and decline of writing. also, the ultra-short attention span of the hoipolloi-just about anything from the past can be dredged up, recycled, and sold to the public. Take tattos-years ago, tattos were confined to a small subculture-sailors, marines, and romantics. now middle class housewives get them. And, despite the enormous amount of communication going on (cellphones, emal, internet, etc.0 the quality of what’s being communicated keeps dropping.
Yes, look at this thread for a start.
There are social inhibitions that didn’t exist in the 1950s, though:
In the 50s, our Rip Van Winkle could probably have said “nigger” or other racial, ethnic, or religious slurs in a public place.
If our RVW were a man, he could have joked publicly about beating his wife or girlfriend.
If our RVW were a pregnant woman, she could have smoked or drank alcohol in a public place.
For that matter, a man or a woman RVW could have smoked pretty much anywhere, and not expect anyone to complain. The lack of ashtrays would probably be pretty surprising.
Our RVW could have joked about driving drunk.
Remembering my own childhood from the 60s, I think if ol’ Rip had fallen asleep then, he’d be most surprised by the emphasis on health and fitness, and the changes in family life.
To Rip, who would probably smoke (as many people did in those days), cigarettes would cost much more than he would have thought, but he wouldn’t be allowed to smoke them anywhere. He’d anticipate a couple of drinks at lunch, but that’s rarely done anymore. Similarly, at the end of the day, he’d want to go home where his wife would fix him a martini or two before the dinner she has prepared–only nowadays, she’s gone to the gym for a workout after her day on the job. Having a wife who works is disturbing to Rip, and “going to the gym for a workout” is a foreign concept–he does remember places like Vic Tanny’s, but they weren’t that popular. But he can fix his own drink and wait for his wife to come home and make dinner.
Of course after she does return and find him sitting there waiting, she asks him why he didn’t prepare some dinner for himself, and preferably for her too. Now they don’t have time to eat, since their son Kyle* (not Mike, Greg, or Jim) has to get to his soccer game. “Isn’t that some European sport?” thinks Rip. “Why isn’t he playing the American game of football?” Rip is pleased to hear that Kyle’s older sister Taylor (not Cathy, Linda, or Mary) is off to the high school “to practice,” but is jarred to find that it is Girls’ Varsity Football practice. To Rip, girls never played football.
Rip is left at the dinner table, without a smoke, without children to ask about their day at school, and without the meat-two-vegetable-and-potato dinner he had been waiting for 40 years for. And he wonders just what has happened in the last 40 years.
- If Rip had really been sleeping for 40 years, I don’t know where Kyle or Taylor came from. But let’s assume, for the purposes of illustration, they are there, OK?
That would depend upon where he’s from. If he’s from the South, definitely. However nearly everywhere else, public use of those terms was generally frowned upon.
And yet, at the same time, he’d probably wonder why people, on the whole, seem fatter.