Impatience: the idea that just because you can get your burger and fries, or your dry cleaning, or your photos fast, that that means you have to.
Besides movies on demand, being able to watch your favorite show(s) whenever you’re ready, even if you were out of town when they were broadcast. Plus, the cult mentality that has built up around certain shows would be baffling.
Not being able to gauge someone’s age instantly by the clothes they wear. That guy’s 40, and he’s wearing jeans? And he’s not even a farmer or a dock worker? That girl is 10? Who let her get her ears pierced?
Similarly, people not dressing up as much as they used to. All those people at the airport – they look like they’re going to clean the garage! And when people do dress up, what on earth are all those hair products? And men and women getting their hair done at the same shop? What’s a salon, I thought that’s where you grow plants.
How hard it is to get away with anything – they have his DNA (what is that again?), his fingerprints, security video showing him entering the building, and the ballistics tests; he’s going down. Except, not, because there are also more laws and more legal red tape, and, as [bAnnie-Xmas** points out, greater reluctance to convict.
There are how many teams in MLB? Three divisions in a league? Auto racing is a sport? An “Oriental” guy playing basketball? Women playing basketball? The top golfer is named Tiger? What does “mixed-race” mean?
Sharing of information. Used to be, a person’s knowledge was dictated by how old they were, how extensive their education was, what experience they might have had in a particular field, and how much reading and studying they did on their own. For instance, I was told about this one family who heard the breaking news on 12/7/41, and had to ask the ultrastudious neighbor kid “Where’s Pearl Harbor?” Now anyone can hop onto Google or Wikipedia or SDMB
and dial up any subject they want to know more about. They don’t have to have lived it or researched it extensively.
People in their sixties not looking it, by 1950s standards. In those days, if you were 60, you had one foot in the grave. Now you might see a 60 y/o out jogging (what, is he military?) and mistake him for 40. Meanwhile, the jeans-wearing 40 y/o I mentioned still gets carded at the liquor store.
When Armstrong got to the moon, was Alice already there?
Eh, I disagree. In the 1950s, rich people got a lot of press for doing nothing more than being rich. One side effect of the cultural revolution was reserving admiration for people who achieved something in sports or the arts. Then the bar gradually lowered on “achievement”, so we’ve merely come full circle.