Without mentioning smartphones or social media, what societal changes have you noticed over the course of your lifetime?
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From an American perspective, flying on an airplane sucks. 9/11/01 resulted in a whole bunch of security theatre at the airport and airlines have slowly whittled away whatever comfort or convience remained.
Why specify the year? Everyone knows what 9/11 is, it's not going to get confused with another 9/11.
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Even with high speed rail you're looking at 30+ hours from Seattle to NYC. And that's optimistic, ignoring the numerous alpine mountains. No thanks.
Yes, all domestic flights in North America are Seattle to NYC.
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I grew up in the farm-y outskirts of a big-ish city. I got to catch lizards and tadpoles and toads in the creek nearby, and we'd collect reeds from cattails and weave them into little mats for fun. we'd walk/bike to our friends house without parents, just yell that your going to so and so's and off you trot. We knew the farmer who grew the sweet corn we ate all summer, and the farmers who had the peach orchard and tomato fields we'd harvest from at the end of summer to can cheap produce for the winter.
The foothills behind our neighborhood were covered with grass and shrub, spattered with bike trails and caves right up to the tree line. There were foxes and racoons that you'd need to protect your chickens from. Deer would chill in our yard in fall eating the fallen Apples from around our trees. Flocks of starlings covered our huge cottonwood trees making a huge racket and pooping everywhere. I'd take a metal baseball bat to our big metal clothesline post to make a big gong noise to scare them off cuz they were so loud.Then a fence went up, blocking us from using the hills, and they started construction on a bunch of high end mc mansions. They filled in the caves, killed the foxes and racoons, and paved over the creek to make a walking trail. More and more deer ended up as roadkill till they stopped coming to eat the apples altogether. Developers bought out the farmers to build more houses, first the tomato fields, then the corn, and finally the peaches were ripped out and paved over. The dairy became a giant strip mall for a Staples, and a Kohl's, a donut shop and a sandwich shop. The road I walked alongside, barefoot, to play in the creek became too busy to be safe for kids to walk next to.
In summer we'd play outside and drink from the hose till we were too hot, then we'd run inside and stand under the swamp cooler to cool down. Year after year it got hotter and hotter till the heat was too much and we couldn't play outside for too long because the swamp cooler wasn't enough to cool us down anymore. In winter we used to make snow men and build igloos with buckets full of snow as bricks, and we'd trample paths into the snow drifts that came up to our hips. But year after year the snow banks got shorter and shorter and the snow came later and later until... I remember the first year we had no snow till after Christmas. The decorations looked so sad and stupid sitting on brown grass instead of coated with bright snow. That's the last year I bothered to put them up. The more people moved to the area, the thicker the smog got in the winter. All the stagnant stinky car exhaust and fumes from the refinery got caught in the bowl of the valley all winter, till the hazy air was so dense you couldn't see the mountains that surrounded us.
The world got hotter and more full of cars and houses all while the people got more stranded inside. Yes by the lure of Internet, but also to try to escape the heat and dust and smog. New neighbors in the big houses would snap at us to get off their lawn then smile like they gave a fuck the next Sunday at church.
Neighborhoods full of community became individuals in houses.
I'm only 34.
This is beautifully written, but also painfully familiar.
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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?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Everyone has reduced their perception of the world to a Bad Apple-esque black and white extreme of good or bad. All In Support or Nuclear Strike Disapproval. No inbetweens allowed.
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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?
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).
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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?
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.
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Interesting. I appreciate the link.
Funny how the US numbers reported are only for a very specific circumstance - possibly taken from conviction rates for such crimes? But anyway, with no data on family/close friend kidnappings, that stat is basically useless isn't it.
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It is now no longer social suicide to not drink.
And it’s not that hard either. I’m out with a new group of people and just ask “do you drink?” If I get a “no” we know not to push it and just continue on like normal. They still join in with all the conversation, we keep discussions around favorite drinks, alcohol, etc light to none and no one is offended or bothered.
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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.
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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?
Kids don't play outside anymore
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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.
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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?
Cartoons went from the majority of them having a unique enough art style to distinguish them from one another. If you take a silhouette of heads/faces from cartoon characters in the 90s and 2000s ( don't have experience with prior decades besides the standard MGM cartoons, Jetsons/Flintstones, or things like Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry ) you'd be able to tell the characters apart, even if you don't even know who they are. Try doing that with most all 2010s and upwards new cartoon characters and you'll get the exact same ugly, generic, and sanitized bean shaped head/face/smile imaginable.
There have definitely been some examples that might deviate a little from that mold, like Summer Camp Island, but those are far and few between anymore.
Also, for the most part, I would consider the overall quality as having been declining as well. I haven't seen a lot of shows, so my experience should be taken with a huge lump of salt, but besides shows like Steven Universe, Summer Camp Island, etcetera, the storytelling hasn't been as tight ( all of this in my opinion ), they're banking on you not actually paying attention to the show itself so they can cheap out on every single step, art style is being sanitized and overly simplified to cut costs, and jokes are all devolving into "LOL RANDOM", but that might have been a 2010s thing and I hope it's dead.
It also doesn't help that fans and fandom culture over time have become worse as well as you'll usually find a vocal minority who will kick and scream while doxxing you because you ship the wrong 2 fictional characters together or don't believe their exact highly specific headcannon, regardless of whether you are the creator or nor. Though, I'm debating of getting rid of this section because it might bleed too much into social media.
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No smoking indoors anymore. I remember when you could still smoke in a hospital. Then they limited it to just a "smoking lounge" on each floor. Followed eventually by a ban inside...to finally no smoking anywhere on hospital property.
Not to mention airplanes, restaurants and movie theaters.
In some airport I’ve had transfers in a few times (I want to say Detroit?) they have a smoking lounge that’s just four glass walls hooked up to a filtration system, and it cracks my shit up every single time to see the smoker terrarium.
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Same. "Gay Humor" was a thing when I was in middle-school/highschool, probably still a thing. If you act feminine as a guy, its "gay". If you act too emotional over a girl, it's "gay". If you answer a question wrong, your a [R-Slur]. Everyone who you had a slight beef with is being a "bitch", even the guys. Sometime the occational gay word equivalent that starts with "f".
Oh this is a blue city (in the US) btw. Circa 2015-2020
The way retard has changed over the years is wild to me. Cause around me there are large communities of people with mental and physical disabilities who aggressively try to tell people that they are infact retarded. It's the word they grew up with and are fighting tooth and nail to keep it from turning into a slur. Even tho it's been used as one against those very people for years.
It's such a weird thing to watch from the side line. Makes me wonder if this is what it was like during the rise of rap and the n word.
Tho it's also getting to the point there's so many letter-slurs that it's getting stupid. At some point feels like we are going to have to either just stop caring and accept that intentions matter more then the words them self. Else we are goanna run out of letters to describe slurs.
Makes it very hard to have meaningful discourse around the topic. To be fair the fear of bans, and punishment for even saying some words regardless of context or topic also just makes it very iffy to talk about this topic in many places.
Hell iv seen people banned on etymology fourms and subs because someone said a "letter" slur with in the context of explaining the origin of the word. It's crazy what the internet has become recently.
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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?
I swear that before 9/11, middle eastern people in the US counted as "white", or at least white-but-you-can-make-fun-of-their-accents-and-names like Italians or Polish people did
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When I was in high school, gay was the generic negative word. If Wendys gave you a medium fry when you ordered a large - gay. If your homie cancelled plans last minute - gay. If you slipped on the stairs and busted your ass - gay. It's bizarre in hindsight.
That's cringe dude
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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.
Way more casual social marijuana use. Way less alcoholics and empty 40s on the sidewalks. Big improvement
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I swear that before 9/11, middle eastern people in the US counted as "white", or at least white-but-you-can-make-fun-of-their-accents-and-names like Italians or Polish people did
Yeah it went from taxi driver jokes to terrorist jokes
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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.
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People are way more free to talk about their mental health problems.
People still don't understand.
"Just be happy" is still a thing.
I didn't say it was perfect. Just better. And I'm sure it's improved more in some places than others.
