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 are way nicer now. Kids in my day were brutal and violent. Most things have improved. People are more aware of dangers to kids now so there are stronger safeguards. Kids are better protected by laws so violence against them is getting less common. Women actually make pretty good money now and aren’t restricted to secretary like roles and there’s less jokes that the woman is a secretary. I had never seen female ceos. They just didn’t exist. Now women can scam the public just as well as men 🤣 There’s still a long way to go but things are a lot better. Gay people aren’t dying of AIDS as much anymore and people will touch gay people without a problem. When I was growing up people believed gay men might be carrying AIDS and would not touch them. Thanks princess di for your work on this. Racial diversity is so much better now. Like women, people of color did not make CEO frequently. It’s still being worked on, but it’s gotten better. Racism itself has gotten better, kids don’t say racial slurs to one another.
As far as environment there was a time when in the US we would celebrate some new technology innovation or infrastructure innovation. I remember when Boeing released a new plane and everyone was like wow so cool, this is redefining planes.
But we have not had that in years. Our desire to be top in tech or science is gone. We used to want to be the best infrastructure, top of the line water treatment and getting to different space discoveries FIRST. Being part of nasa was a huge dream for many kids to just explore the planets.
Now china has all this high speed transit and we have decaying pipes. In my childhood, this would not have been accepted. China was frowned upon.
Other countries have gotten better to the point they surpassed us. When I would visit Mexico it would be to help build in rural areas. Now our rural areas are further decrepit than anything I saw there back then and Mexico City is a vibrant bustling gorgeous place.
One visit to Apalachia and I have wondered how America got this way.
There was also a lot more stress around decorum. This one was a double edged sword. People cared a lot about how they were perceived to the point of committing heinous acts to cover up the slightest insult to their character or perception. Now, it’s more free. We don’t keep up with the Joneses on the level it was back then. Being loud or dressing any type of way means nothing. It’s all good.
But that has also led to the open and blatant acceptance of things like felonious behavior and led to what we have now. This kind of scandal would never have flown.
But then again, no woman could have ever HOPED to run for president.
There is also a lot more macro interests. I believe the people have more power now. Before, you had to listen to what’s on the radio. You had to watch why’s on tv. Trends could be fully controlled by the owners of these resources. Now your friend can post a video of their thermos surviving a car accident and suddenly a company who’s entire perception could not have possibly entered mainstream can. There is more freedom as a macro economy, you can truly access what interests you. This also leads to “too much choice” sometimes but it’s definitely awesome for some of us with unique interests. It has also leveled the playing field in way for trends to be able to match without extreme financial backing. You don’t have to be part of the big guys for your song or dance to go viral. You can have a niche on YouTube and make a living on commentary videos. You could not do this before.
Finally, the access to tech has not only improved our lives but brought a level of freedom unheard of. In my day, only movie studios had the tools to make media. Now people can express themselves with minimal financial investment. People are creating at levels never seen before because they finally have access to tools needed for it. Microphones, software, cameras, painting classes, and the world has distinctly become more and more creative and colorful. This is also helped by the less keeping up with the Joneses worrying about their perception thing. The more free we are in creating and expression, the more diverse and beautiful our works get. And yes I think it’s cool people can openly create furry porn and then connect with others who like it. This is truly something unimaginable to my generation. Our weirdness was violently oppressed. Now we out here turning that violence into twilight fanfics that spawn movie franchises.
You win some you lose some.
The world has less colour.
This isn’t a dramatic “I’m depressed” post, though that is a factor. Nature is still nature-coloured, for one, and it still looks lovely.
I mean that like, you’d go outside and look at the cars and see a rainbow of colours. Now it’s all black, silver, or white. You only see colorful cars if they are really old beat up rustbuckets or if they are brand new luxury vehicles used by super rich people.
Buildings too. Businesses and the buildings they set up shop in would be painted with garish, eye popping colour. Now everything trends towards landlord-beige.
Edit: And it should be noted, this happened for a reason, and I am aware of that reason, and that just makes me crankier.
I’ve noticed that as well, most cities in the States are all different shades of brown and grey. It’s kinda sad to see.
I always assumed that bland colors were easier to maintain and appealed to more people. But by God let’s not have any color in the world because of resale value…
easier to maintain
The thing is
they’re kinda not?
Grey(“Silver”) on cars kinda is in the sense that it “hides” dirt, but like, that particular shade of landlord beige they use on buildings? That becomes an ugly colour within weeks of exposure to the elements. And would require constant repainting to stay looking good.
It’s all about that resale value and the fact that nowadays no one buys anything expecting to keep it for very long. So the less “personal” things are, the better to pass them along.
deleted by creator
Resale. The reason is resale. Between the economy being trashed, planned obsolescence, and cultural shifts. People buy things not really expecting to keep them for very long, and the less individual something is, the easier to sell it on to someone else later.
In not particular order, and a kind reminder that I’m not from US so some things may look different if you are from there:
People are far noisier, as there is less concerns by being judged by your neighbors. People used to behave purely out of shame. Now the shame is gone and people are wild.
Vast increase in dog ownership. There’s literally more dog than small kids in my country from several years now.
Vast increase in immigration. Statistics are weird here, as we give citizenship to a great amount of migrants in just two years, and here is illegal to record statistics based on ethnicity, country of origin or any aspect that would identify anyone’s ancestry. But my neighborhood went to 90-10 national-immigrant to 40-60. I live in a poor neighborhood so it’s not the same in all parts of the country, but immigration increase is there and it’s a big change.
Less violence overall. Street violence overall seems lower. Also there’s less of a terrorists threat as we used to have (there were several active terrorists groups here that are now gone).
A housing problem. People used to get a house without issues. Now it’s one of the biggest issues of young people.
Increase of tolerance towards homosexuality. It’s view as something very normal nowadays I think, and it use not to be that way.
Increase of equality between men and women. Direct discrimination is completely outlaw and hard to see. Indirect discrimination may still exist but is on a all time low. Most bosses I have had in all my jobs have been women (for giving a small example).
People go on vacation more often and further away. When I was young people used to just go one time a year on vacation, most of the time to a national place. Now people go several times a year to foreign countries, and “travel” have become the most important thing in many people’s lives (how many dating profiles have I seen in which the person pointed traveling as their life moto).
Most people have university studies. It didn’t used to be that way.
There’s probably much more. Those are the first things that came into my mind.
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.
Isolation of individuals and the growing loss of ownership of, well, everything.
There’s not as many people outside just…existing. I’m not that old but I remember just going outside and seeing people just not doing anything in particular everywhere, now it seems like everyone always has some place to rush to and no one is allowed to just exist in public places anymore. Maybe that also has something to do with my perspective shifting has I got older, but I still feel like it’s true.
Also bugs. There are like NO fucking bugs anymore. Couple decades ago you could walk out and get sandblasted by a million different bugs and now everything just feels so fucking dead and sterile and depressed. It’s like outside was replaced by a clinic and no one bothered to complain.
The bug thing seriously worries me
I remember so many more bugs as a child. I haven’t needed mosquito spray in quite a while even while hiking
I live in a massive city and you’ll see loads of people just existing all the time.
I used to think the same about bugs too but I see shit loads when walking near trees and in the woods or down canals. Even my car still murders 100’s on a commute to work. Headed you don’t see them in city centre but that’s just hygiene is better now. IMO
4 things
-
People are getting lonelier and lonelier, even if we have the technoloogy, we keep getting further apart, it takes weeks to make time to see someone. So here I am, travelling alone…
-
The attention span
-
The willingness to actually do some legwork, laziness, or conformity.
-
This will not sound nice: people getting dumber. There. I said it.
my 4 cents
peepull arnt getten dummer tho
dey allreddy was dumm b4
dum ppl got moar voyse naow
-
Humanity getting dumber and dumber…
Nah, its just that the stupid people got louder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
People got smarter overall.
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
No third places.
I’ve watched things go from “how can we profit from this?” to “how much can we profit from this without quite killing the plebs?”
No one admits when they don’t know something. The mentality of, fake it until you make it, casts ignorance as some sort of failure to be ridiculed. As a result we have politicians and laymen believing they can do something or know better than experts on a specific topic.
The other is the complete lack of humility or embarrassment when fucking up. People will just stream or post their most idiotic ideas to get ‘views,’ even if it makes them look terrible. This idea where you need to live-stream your entire life baffles me. Not sure if this falls under the tech and social media restriction of this post.
From an artistic perspective, self-“publishing” (and I use quotations quite on purpose), changed writing as we know it and drastically dropped the average reading level of the public since now any chimp can bang their fist on a keyboard for an hour, upload it to Amazon and call themselves an “author” beside Stephen King or Umberto Eco.
It was always hailed as “the end of the so-called gatekeepers”. Without stopping to realise that gatekeepers/publishers exist for a reason. So that the public zeitgeist isn’t completely overrun with utter crap.
The response to having your short story or novel rejected used to be “okay…I’ll learn, practice and get better for the next time.” Now, it’s “screw you…I’ll pollute the zeitgeist with my 3rd grade level grammar nightmare with or without you and put it right up there on the shelf next to the actual writers.”
Just imagine if a doctor flunked out of med-school, and instead of trying harder, just said “screw you, I’m going to open up my own surgery and put it right next door to you and there’s nothing you can do to stop me…”
What a crazy stupid world we live in.
Writing is an art, anyone should be able to do it and judge for themselves whether their work is good enough to share, and just because it’s been published doesn’t mean you have to read it. I would rather have to actively look for a book to read next via reviews than have what’s on the market mostly controlled by some businesses.
Writing is so much more than just art though. Writing is also education. Writing is also a chronicle of culture and of history. Writing educates us about our past and our future and our present in a way that goes beyond statistics, dates, figures and memorised names. It, in a way that other art forms can only touch on, enriches our understanding of ourselves as a species and our place in the world
We know, at least in part, about Antebellum south, not just by reading history texts, but by reading Mark Twain. Our knowledge of the dustbowl is similarly enriched by Steinbeck. Thanks to Homer, Ovid, and others, Ancient Rome isn’t just dusty stats and numbers, it’s a living breathing history that you don’t get from history books. Thanks to Orwell and Huxley we can look at our present world and see warnings rather than being completely blindsided by current events.
THAT is the power of writing.
And you’re saying that this generation’s contribution to that; this generation’s contribution to the future’s understanding of us is some asshole’s Edward Cullen Slash fic?
That’s ridiculous.
Am I elitist in this opinion? ABSOLUTELY. UNASHAMEDLY. It’s too important NOT to be.
You want to write your own dumb-ass crap, that’s perfectly fine. We ALL did that. We used to write it, share it among our friends and family, have a good laugh about it, and then put it in a drawer and never think about them again. I myself have a filing cabinet FULL of those things.
But what we didn’t do (at least not in the mass numbers technology allows us to do now), is enshrine those horrible pieces of shit into the zeitgeist just because it’s free to do so on fucking Amazon. We didn’t pollute this generations contribution to the future with our own laugable crap just because we could.
Some people eventually got good enough that our work deserved to be included in that zeitgeist, even if it was just a couple of short stories making it past the so-called “gate-keepers”. But more of us didn’t, and never would.
We still write, because you are absolutely right in that a person who wants to write their own crap without bothering to learn, or get better, or even understand what makes good writing “good” in the first place, is welcome to do so. It’s a very welcoming art form in that respect.
But leave what gets remembered by history to the people who are actually fucking good at it.
What’s going to be remembered are the things that are truly worthwhile. I for one have no problem looking stupid in front of the other generations if it means there’s more creativity and knowledge being spread around.
I believe your view on this matter is due largely in part to the fact that so much content nowadays is easily accessible and quality control doesn’t happen behind closed doors nearly as much anymore. You are seeing with your own eyes a bunch of dumb shit that would usually get rejected by publishers instead of the general public. But if some are as bad as you say they are, then they’ll get rejected all the same. You really think someone in 50 years will be reading some trashy hunger games ripoff? No, they’ll be reading what’s actually worthwhile. With freedom comes choice, and with choice comes confusion and the option to choose wrong. I still prefer freedom. If you want to protect the sanctity of writing or something like that, support authors who you think do good work, don’t complain about the stupid ones.
But if some are as bad as you say they are, then they’ll get rejected all the same
Oh I don’t disagree with you on that.
However, because the barrier to entry is gone, and even financially there’s no barrier to getting your work out there, even rejection isn’t enough to curtail the slop.
First “self-published” novel got 1 review that literally called it “an atrocity worthy of the Nuremburg trials”? Who cares. Publish that sequel…and the sequel after that. There’s literally no incentive to get better and no dis-incentive to prevent it no matter how crap the work might be.
The only real incentive anymore to stop publishing your glorious 12-volumes-and-counting epic story about a space wizard that has never actually sold a single copy is literally self-shame, which, in art circles, is not a common commodity.
So regardless of whether or not they are being read, or purchased, they’re still just taking up more and more space. Adding more and more static to the crap that the future is going to have to sift through.
To me, anyway, it has less to do with gate-keeping and more to do with curation.
Curation is more than possible no matter what volume of titles there are. Review sites, recommendations, etc. are good places to start. I would rather spend 10 minutes for every book I read verifying that other people enjoyed it than one single book anywhere be judged unfairly just because the author is bad at dealing with publishers, or the book contains content that publishers would see as obscene or offensive, and is thus cut off from ever being read by a stranger.
Books that very few people enjoy are also going to be a lot rarer (even in digital copies) than books that many people enjoy. The creme of the crop is always going to be made pretty obvious.
I admire your optimism about cream rising to the top. But I just can’t share it.
The average person isn’t going to spend an hour digging through a literal trash-heap on Amazon in order to find something worth their time. They’ll give up after five minutes of reading terrible review after terrible review and then go find something else to do with their time.
And thus the collective intelligence of humanity drops; not because they’re actually reading all of this white noise of self-published crap. But because they’re not reading at all because of the effort it takes to weed through it at the book store (digital or otherwise).
The best example I can give is how “Oprah’s Book Club” (am I giving away how damn old I am yet?) got people reading. They read because they didn’t have to go and find this stuff themselves. Someone curated it for them, told them “Hey…this is good”.
If the average reader didn’t have Oprah and had to dig through five thousand Amazon self-published “suggestions” before stumbling onto Toni Morrison or Push by Sapphire, they’re quickly go doom scroll Facebook instead.
Like I said, I admire your optimism and a part of me wishes I could share it. But the idea that the lack of any accountability for self-“published” drivel completely muddies any real “discover-ability” of the actual good stuff is a hill that my elitist ass will happily die on.
I know this will sound really condescending, but you can sort entries by highest ratings on any good website. You do not actually have to browse through every single book ever made.
I think for me in my country it would be the collapse of the social contract. The bonds that society regulates itself.
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
If a single act of terrorism can remove an entire ethnic group from whiteness, then I wanna see the rest of the world agree that European Americans aren’t white. It would be funny
some European right wingers already believe this
There are more idiots. Flatearthers, space deniers, antivaxxers. The more information people have access to the less intelligent society seems to get.
Surveillance Capitalism is getting more out of hand every year. Combined with more data breaches it’s not great.
The number of idiots definitely grew, but the percentage of idiots overall probably dropped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
People got smarter. Idiots grew louder.
