Originally it was going to be “over the last twenty years” but I decided to be more flexible.
A lot of discussions about how society has changed or how the world is different always circle around to smartphones, social media, “no one talks to each other in person, they’re on their phones always” and the like.
Outside of those topics, what else has changed, by your perception?
It still feels a little odd to me that restaurants don’t ask “smoking or non?”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted everything stopped smelling like ash. But it’s surreal to remember my grand parents chain smoking over pancakes at Dennys.
The death of appointment television.
haha my dad was a tech nerd and when he bought his first programmable VCR back in the '80s he was on top of the world. He was recording everything…
Appointment television?
I haven’t heard the term but I assume it means watching TV on the station’s schedule. You know, broadcast and cable.
A very popular show that everyone would watch live as it aired the first time. Then you could talk about it with everyone for a week because everyone is on the same episode. There was little to no ways to watch it if you missed it and you’d basically be screwed.
Oh I wasn’t allowed to watch tele growing up. No wonder I have no idea what this is
Is sex different? It seems like sex has changed in society. Like, more openness, less taboo. But also conservative sexual beliefs seem to be pulling harder in the opposite direction.
I think for me in my country it would be the collapse of the social contract. The bonds that society regulates itself.
I’ve been arrested, held up at gun point, and spent a few weeks in a Texas jail in the 90s because I like smoking weed. Now I have 3 weed stores within 2 miles of me, and it’s as mundane as buying a loaf of bread. So that’s a positive in my book.
haha yeah I’ve been a pothead for 40-several years and I got my Florida MMU card last year. It took me a while to get past my “kid in a candy store” phase. Geez I wasn’t used to having ANY choice, let alone that many choices 😆
Way more casual social marijuana use. Way less alcoholics and empty 40s on the sidewalks. Big improvement
Cable TV use to be something that teathered us all together in a way. We were all stuck on the same schedule for premiers of new episodes of different shows so we all had a common thing to talk about come the next day. Now I have no idea what’s playing on what service and have just given up on staying up to date on the new shows. I could have access to $TVShow but probably won’t watch it because I don’t like to binge watch so it takes me longer to catch up and by the time I do it has already left the minds of my peers so why bother.
Game of Thrones was the last time I had this experience.
I could have access to $TVShow but probably won’t watch it because I don’t like to binge watch so it takes me longer to catch up and by the time I do it has already left the minds of my peers so why bother.
I enjoy not having my entertainment options constrained by whether other people are watching them at the same time, so I’m loving the change. Especially since I didn’t like over half of the shows that ‘everybody’ watched.
Hot take but Sam and Diane had no chemistry
“NORM!”
Humanity getting dumber and dumber…
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Actually…
study - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
CNN article talking about the study - https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-study-intl/index.html
Interesting it briefly went back up in the 90s for many before dropping again.
I imagine it was because of the transition from analog to digital in many things
When I was a kid, it was common for members of parliament to vote freely per their riding with whipped votes being limited to confidence votes.
Now, thanks to Stephen Harper going hard on the precedent set by Jean Chretien, free votes basically don’t exist in parliament.
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I got started on the Internet in 1988. You had to learn Unix (Linux didn’t exist yet) and the command line (GUI Internet didn’t exist yet), and had to manually piece together files to download them (www didn’t exist yet).
Gods, and I felt I was early. I used gopher pre-www, and definitely had interacted with computers by 88, but interacting with networking by that time was virtually unheard of outside of academic or defense settings.
Negative: Worse driving interactions (as a pedestrian/cyclist), especially post-covid.
Positive: People are generally more accepting of things, and people seem to be more comfortable sharing parts of them that make themselves different from the “norm”.
The circa 1990 nature of American society has been erased so completely that it is hard to believe how drastically it has changed.
Movies used to depict child molestation (Indiana Jones) or outright rape (Revenge of the Nerds) as normal and to be celebrated when it was done by the heroes. A lot of crimes got viewed through the lens of whether it was “our people” doing them. The thinking features in a lot of old movies.
The cops who beat Rodney King were found not guilty by a jury, in the first trial. After all, they’re the cops, they’re allowed. Drunk driving was fine, as long as you were one of the right kind of people. The cops would beat the fuck out of people and it was fine. The factory in town could be polluting the river and it was fine as long as dad had a job. And so on.
The uniformity of thought that TV enforced, before the internet, is really not well understood. If you thought Israel was bad, then you and Noam Chomsky were literally the only ones. Even as late in the arc as the Iraq War, I would say about 95% of the people who didn’t get their news from the internet supported the war. Watch one of the debates where Ron Paul was speaking against the war with everyone else (except the audience) just weirded out and confused by it, or the “Media-Opoly” short that aired on SNL once and then never again, to get some idea by contrast of how airtight the lock on narrative used to be. TV and newspapers are still kind of that way, but they don’t have the media monopoly they used to. It used to be that someone probably would live their entire adult life without ever hearing the kind of political viewpoints you see every day on Lemmy as normal things.
On the other hand, along with the expectation that everyone was kind of a piece of shit and that’s how life is, came a kind of backbone for resistance that I feel like is missing today. Woodstock ‘99 would be a pretty normal “yeah they robbed us” badly organized festival today. It was way better than the Fyre Festival, and people at Fyre just took it, or called their lawyers. At Woodstock ‘99, the kids threw bottles and batteries at Kurt Loder, broke in the ATMs and stole their money back, and then ripped the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground.
The cops who beat Rodney King were found not guilty by a jury, in the first trial. After all, they’re the cops, they’re allowed. [snip] The cops would beat the fuck out of people and it was fine.
This hasn’t really changed though.
but back then it was “fine” because it never made the news…
It absolutely has. Before Rodney King it was always fine. From 1992 to about 2014 it was mostly fine. From 2014-2020, it was a debate, and after 2020, they’re pretty much always guilty. There’s a whole interesting conversation to be had about why it was that all kinds of riot and peaceful protest had basically 0 result until 2014-2020, and then in 2020 it all of a sudden starting working significantly.
Anyway, now under Trump, some of the reform is going backwards. There were some outlier departments that were still in the 1992 mode, and the feds were doing some things to try to come down on them, whereas now it’s the opposite, Trump is actively pardoning dirty cops. Great stuff.
It was not fine. There was a whole riot about it and everything.
The only thing that’s changed recently is that cops can occasionally be held accountable if they cause enough embarrassment to the powers that be.
Can you name three incidents since 2020 where the cops have not been charged? I know of one, and even that one has an asterisk next to it. Before 2020 it was multiple every year, there used to be these massive walls with names written on them.
Hats, almost completely removed from formal settings and now only in informal settings.
People have a much more rigid and accurate sense of time. You don’t meet for lunch, you meet at 12pm on the dot. People don’t wait for someone for half an hour, they wait like 5 minutes or so.
People talk much more openly about problems and their views. When I was young people didn’t really talk about religion, politics, medical issues, and so on in public. Now people will tell you they are on an antidepressant or LGBT+ and be open about things.
That rigid sense of time brings back memories. As a kid you’d have to wait on some corner to meet with friends and go out. Without smartphones there was no way of knowing where they were or what time they’d show up. If they were late you had to simply wait for them to show up or at some point decide to leave. All without being able to communicate anything. So everybody was a bit more flexible and relaxed about waiting on eachother.
Isolation of individuals and the growing loss of ownership of, well, everything.
Design has changed. Instead of building powerful featues that are available to the user however they want to use it. The focus has shifted to providing a simplified linear interface where pressing a single button does the task and the tools to modify the action are hidden from the user. So if your use case doesnt 100% allign youre fucked.
