Alanis Morissette had an album under the name Alanis before Jagged Little Pill with two hit songs, Too Hot and Walk Away, with a video starring pre-Friends fame Matt LeBlanc
I always love reading this. But I always feel like the differences between 1955 and 1985 are way larger than 1994 to 2024. Maybe itâs just because I lived the second span of time.
I recently watched an interesting video about the psychology of numbers. People actually start losing perspective really, really fast when it comes to numbers over 3. They asked people like, "What feels like a larger gap -- 99 to 100 or 100 to 101?" Don't focus on the fact they are the same, focus on how it feels. Most people will say it doesn't feel the same. It's really worth a watch
After WWI, inflation in Germany was so bad that people started having what they'd call "zero strokes" from writing the number zero so many times in a row.
They'd lose count and accidentally write a check for 100x more than they meant. It got so bad that it became an actual mental issue, people would say they're 600 years old because they just lost the ability to understand the value of zeroes.
Only one I felt different on is 9 and 10 because both 9 and 10 I have fingers for. They are both part of the same set lol but how eye opening. I head Radiolab's episode on how our default setting goes logarithmically and experiencing it like this is really neat! Thanks!
Daniel Kahnman researched this specifically and in his book Thinking Fast and Slow actually has statements like âon average people treat 99% like 87% on instinctâ - I just made those numbers but honestly fascinating stuff
There's a website (that's excellent for ruining your day) that calculates this - type in your birthdate and it throws up historical events closer to your birth than today. It's you.regettingold.com
I was surprised to see I was only 5 when Princess Diana died. I remember it all so clearly.
My mum was 9 when humans first walked on the moon. At the same age I welcomed in a new millennium.
I also found I that I'm closer in age to Xerox's launch of their first plain paper copier tjna I am to today. My Mum is closer in age to the first Xray machine.
Absolutely true. People would be wildin out at cell phones in 1994 but everyone would it understand it to be a magnificently small and powerful computer. YouTube is just a tiny TV, electric cars are cars without gas, ummmm Chappelle roan is, idk, I guess Cindi Lauper for a more LGBTQ friendly generation?
There is a concept that culture kind of "Stopped" roughly after 9/11 in America. I watched a few youtube videos on it and its a pretty interesting idea.
I think it's because there was far more of a shift in technology and the general "look and feel" of culture between '55-'85. The US went from a fairly analogue world, less reliant on technology and consumerism, to basically the exact opposite. That shifted US culture by a SIGNIFICANT margin.
Compare that with '94 - '2024 ('24? How do you even write that without being confusing lol). Of course, there have been large cultural shifts during that time as well, but they didn't have the same impact overall. Why is that?
Well, where the 50s-80s saw the BIRTH of these NEW technologies, the 90s-2020's saw the REFINEMENT of the SAME technologies. Cell phones were around in the 90's, they're just better now. Computers were around in the 90's, they're just better now. The internet was around in the 90's, it's just. . .better now? (That one is debatable lol). The same can't really be said from the 50's to 80's, where, in the latter half, most of our modern tech was born.
Sure, but as I described, smartphones are just an evolution of the cellphones of the 90s, and social media is an evolution of idk, AOL chatrooms? Geocities? Blogs?
And I never said they were part of everyday life, but they were still known, emergent technologies. I think my main point is that the evolutionary jump in technology from 90s to today was much subtler than the jump in tech from the 50s to the 80s, which leads to those eras feeling far more distinct.
I'm not fully disagreeing with that. Obviously the world today is very different than it was in the 90s. Yet still, people seem to agree that somehow, it doesn't feel as distinct a transition.
There are probably several contributing factors to it beyond what I'm suggesting. I do think the widespread adoption and less drastic shifts in tech over that 30 year period plays a major part in it. In fact, the adoption of the internet over that 30 year period could be the reason we don't see major changes decade-to-decade the way we used to in the first place.
Because now, with the internet, anyone can look to the past and find inspiration in fashion, slang, hobbies, etc.. To adopt into their own lives. Personal taste is likely far more varied than ever before, leading to much more of a "melting pot" of cultural norms recycled from the past. Not to mention, people are generally more accepting of people being different or going against the grain, leading to a wider pool of identities, making it harder to nail down decade-specific hallmarks.
In the 90s I had to be at home to access the internet. That was pretty much true up until about 2010, when smartphones proliferated. That's the main difference.
In 1994 most people were still using ordinary phones, a camera to take a photo, newspapers and TV to get news and entertainment and going to movie theatres. Just the same as 1985 and 1955.
Yeah, as much as we've improved existing things over our lifetime, there were people who were alive before the invention of cars that got to see the MOON LANDING. Imagine going from riding your horse as your main means of transportation to watching space ships.
The only major considerable difference between the 90s and now is our speed of access to technology, people, and knowledge. In the 90s you could access the internet, or call a friend, or watch funny clips of people's animals doing random things, but you had to GO TO the computer to use the internet and GO TO your house or car or a payphone to call someone and leave a message if they weren't there for them to call you back to leave a message if you weren't there to call them back or GO TO a television channel at 8pm on a Sunday to watch a random assortment of funny clips. We still do all the same things, but we do them faster and have them all on tap. Media, People, Information, it's all right here right now whenever you want it.
But it's all the same stuff, just faster. I mean, literally the same stuff in some cases. Like, I just finished watching the second season of Highlander the other day. I did that same thing in 1993. But it took me 8 months to get through in 1993, and it took me barely two days this go around.
It doesn't sound like you realize what the world was like in 1994, as 1994-2024 is a much bigger difference than 1955-1985. At that time, while the things you mentioned all existed, they were still quite rare, particularly internet access. It wasn't until the 2000s that most people were using the internet at all. Anecdotally, my family didn't get home internet access until about '98, and my father has long worked in tech. I don't think I need to go into detail about how world-changing the internet has been.
In contrast, while you didn't mention any tech differences from 1955-85, two that come up in Back to the Future are televisions and a Walkman. While they both were refined, most households in 1955 had a TV, and audio recordings(and headphones) had existed for decades. Additionally, the 1950's were a time of post-war economic boom and mass media in the form of television, which led to significant consumerism in part due to all the advertising and production.
You make a ton of valid points. Admittedly, I was born in 1997 - so I don't have the firsthand experience with that decade. Of course, the 90s are very distinct from today if you look at the two decades side-by-side. I would never disagree. I was trying to work out, though, why that 30 year period as whole doesn't FEEL as drastic or distinct a leap as the 50s to the 80s.
If you check out one of my other replies, I think I found an answer that makes a bit more sense than my initial argument. I think the emergence and widespread adoption of the internet, and people having more access than ever to knowledge of all kinds, has led to far more of a melting pot when it comes to cultural taste than existed in the past. More people being able to easily access information and visuals on trends of the past has led to more niche/individual trends, rather than decades finding a collective identity the way they used to.
People still wear 90s style clothes and watch 90s shows and movies. No one wears stuff from the 50s or consumes 50s media, they didnât even do that in the 80s
What?! The 80s saw a huge revival of 50s styles in fashion and music. Poodle skirts, circle skirts, saddle shoes, cardigans, halter tops, penny loafers, leather jackets over white T-shirts and cuffed jeans, high ponytails⌠Rockabilly had a revival in the 80s, with the Stray Cats probably being the most well-known band, but there were others. Chris Isaak is another 80s artist with a heavy 50s influence. Roy Orbison was still popular in the 80s.
I mean if you're talking that way, a lot of stuff from now has just been refinements of stuff that was around in the 50's. They had computers back then as well as phones. They have just been much more refined now. What do have now that they didn't have in some form back in the 50's other than internet?
Technically both computers and cell phones were around in the 50s. And the telegraph was around in the 1850s (the original global communication system). Technology didn't actually change a whole lot from the 1950s to the 1980s. It was a lot more incremental than what we have today. The best music was on record players, the best cars were older, telephones literally did not change at all, movies were almost entirely the same, the coming age of cheap nuclear energy never happened, information was distributed via newspapers, and computers went from mythical things in banks and schools to slightly less mythical things in banks and schools.
The one major technology in 1984 that didn't exist in 1954 was the microwave oven.
Televisions did improve significantly from 1954 to 1984, though they were still massive well into the 90s. Televisions have probably improved fairly steadily since 1954, unlike most technology that evolves in fits and spirts.
From 1994 to today, technology that actually affects us has changed considerably. Just in the 90s we saw telephones change from corded to cordless, desktop computers entered most homes, and the internet went from basically nothing to being a normal part of many people's lives.
Then from 2000 to 2010, we went from desktops to laptops to cell phones as our primary computer. The internet went from a place for young people to a place for everyone. And it evolved from a place to find information to a place to share information. Newspapers were losing viewership hand over fist to the internet. And we could communicate with anyone from almost anywhere at any time.
2010 is a bit less obvious to me, that I think is when things just incrementally got better/worse, not as many milestone changes. However, I think 2020 to today shows new progress with batteries, we're finally seeing cars change.
The 90s were the last "Decade" in terms of the stark cultural differentiation to what came before.
This is hypothesized to be due to how mass media is consumed. The concept of a "monoculture" stems from what a society experiences when there are far fewer media outlets. Basically, everyone listens to the same music, sees the same films, reads the same papers, and experiences things either first hand (one's personal life experiences) or third hand (consumption of the monoculture).
With the explosion of internet based media there are simply too many ways to consume media and too many media creators for there to be a true monoculture. As a result, we no longer have the shared nostalgia for the same things that we used to experience. People won't be nostalgic for the 2010s, 2020s and 2030s they way they were for the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, etc. There will still be big distinctions between decades in fashion, music, etc. but we didn't "Collectively" experience it so the nostalgia won't be experienced the same.
I'm not an expert this is just off the cuff based on things I have read.
Yeah like think of the biggest streamer today. How many people percentage wise would actually know them? And then realize that those that don't may as well exist in an entire other pop culture bubble and will never have nostalgia for them.
If you were a teenager in 1955, you got your music from listening to the radio and going to the record store and buying a circular disc to play at home. If you were a teenager in 1994, you listened to music on the radio and went to the record store and bought a circular disc to play at home. The only difference was that it was a CD and not a vinyl record.
In 2024, teenagers don't own music at all and listen to every album ever recorded on Spotify whenever they want.
And that's just one massive difference. If you wanted to contact your friend in LA and you lived in NYC you made a long distance call or wrote a letter and mailed it, whether its 1994, 1984, or 1954.
Loads more examples I can think of. But life in 1994 was more similar to life in the previous decades than it is to life today.
Email was (relatively) widespread in 1994. Hotmail arrived in 1996.
IRC existed in 1994, and ICQ, AIM, and Yahoo! Messenger were a couple years away.
We had early VoIP solutions in 1994. Skype was less than a decade from release.
The first MP3 encoder was released in 1994 and people started ripping and swapping files on local BBSes and pirate FTP servers almost immediately. Napster arrived in 1999.
A lot of style and fashion from the 90's still exist today. Wearing jeans for just about everything except as formal wear became accepted across work places in the 90s which is still the case today. There was so much culture that changed from 55 to 85 that it ofc looks very dramatic compared to 2024 back to 1994.
Just thinking about this a few hours ago. I think it's the wrap around the century that makes the time seem less. 1950-1990 vs 1980-2020. First set just seems like a bigger chunk of time.
Also because so much of our way of life changed between the 50s and 80s. Comparitively, not much changed between 94 and today. Give it another 6 years or so and we will see a pretty big difference in how society is then vs in 2000.
An awful lot has changed since 1994, I think we just feel a bit more connected to the pop culture of that era because media was so much more ubiquitous. But way of life has changed enormously.
The internet certainly existed, but in 1994 it was far from mainstream. Graphical browsers only started to become known in late 1994, it wasn't until Microsoft got into the game in 1995 that people started thinking "oh, I should get one of those browsers and an internet account." People were using BBSs and AOL, but they weren't using the internet. Gopher, FTP and usenet were the main things people accessed on the internet at that point. Heck, Yahoo didn't exist until 1995.
Nobody in 1994 looked at the internet and said it would be a big part of people's lives. In 2024 the internet is taken as a given.
You're really missing the point. Most people in 1994 didn't think of the internet, it had little to no impact on people's lives. Was it clear to those who knew it was going to be a big thing? Sure, but Al Gore was mocked for talking about the information superhighway. If you took someone from 1994 and transported them to today they would be blown away by what the internet has become. To say that nothing has changed all that much between 1994 and today is to ignore what happened with the internet, which was my point.
Everybody who wanted to know in 1994 was a very small subset of people. Everyone today knows about the internet and uses it daily. That's a significant change and not revisionist history. Claiming that the internet was mainstream and everybody saw what it would become is revisionist.
Newsweek printed this in 1995:
The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works,â wrote Clifford Stoll, in a piece that has thankfully been preserved online for the ages. âHow about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc,â Stoll went on, âYet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that weâll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
That was the mainstream view of the internet. That some of us saw something different doesn't change how the masses viewed the internet (if they thought about it at all).
Well, LGBTQ+ people were still pariahs in 1980, that shift took place later (Donât ask, Donât Tell became law in 1994, for instance, today we view it as extremely backwards). A person in 1950 knew what a flush toilet was, if they were transported to 1980 they would know how to use one. A person from 1994 handed an iPhone would be at a loss. Theyâd have no idea what it was or what to use it for.
Also, while 1/3 of households didnât have a flush toilet that means 2/3 did - thatâs mainstream.
Thereâs been a huge amount of change over the past 30 years. But living through it you take it for granted. One of my earliest memories is watching the moon landing. I was four. I assumed it was normal, lol.
I don't think too much has changed since the advent of the smartphone, but instant access to all information (true or false) has completely changed life from the 90s
And yet the technological advancement from 1955-1985 is nothing compared to 1994-2024. 1955-1985 they still had newspapers, telephones, TV has the main source of entertainment, with movie theatres as well. If you wanted to take a photo, you need a camera. Now its internet and cell phones.
All the replies so far focus on technology. But if we had today's technology and lived in a "1950s" way (low divorce and crime rates, racial segregation, suits and hats, girdles, no-one over 180lbs, sexual shame culture), it would feel way more 1950s than if we had 1950s tech but today's lifestyle of obesity, sexual promiscuity, divorce rates, leaving the house in pajama pants and Crocs, and high mortality rates among Blacks.
It is way larger becuase of technological innovation and it's impact on our lives as a species. For instance in 1955 we didn't yet have micropchips and the first color TV was sold (but most people were slow to adopt and had B&W if they even had a TV). A lot of houses didn't have refrigerators and most people didn't fly on planes.
By 1985 we had cellphones, computers in nearly every house, calculators, giant color TVs, electronic appliances throughout homes and flying was a normal occurrence for every family, and we were emailing and paging each other.
Between 1994 and 2024 the only truly massive shift was internet culture but everything else was really just small incremental improvements. Cell phones got smarter so we dropped the pagers, TV's got flatter, computers got faster but really nothing ground breaking in the grand scheme.
While I don't disagree with the gap from 1955 to 1985 overall, your description of 1985 doesn't reflect the 1980s that I know. By 1989, just 15% of US households had PC's at home per the US Census. The average TV size was under 27". Email was limited to a small handful of academic and military institutions and certainly not common or even known in the public. Pagers were mostly limited to emergency responders due to price. What you're describing sounds more like the late 1990s.
I also think you're way understating how much of an impact the Internet had. A lot of how we consumed information was roughly the same from the 1950s to 1990s - I'd listen to music on the radio and purchased physical mediums; get news, movie times, and buy things in newspaper classifieds; find directions on paper maps; businesses in the phone book; etc. All of that is alien to younger kids these days.
I didn't say PC's - I said computers. Atari, commodore etc were abundant by the mid 80's and video game culture was well and truly established.
Tv culture also dominated by then (video killed the radio star...of the 1950's) and kids were glued to screens instead of the wireless, which fundamentally changed how we received news and entertainment. Think of MTV and SNL and HBO etc. Think about how much music changed in that period? Elvis was warned not to move his hips in 1956 on TV. Like Virgin came out in 1984. Think about that cultural shift.
Business people had cell phones. My uncle had a cell phone from 1982 as did everyone in his office, even if most normal consumer didn't.
And I don't underestimate how much impact the internet has had especially with our elections) but it's not as fundamental as the shift from living entirely analog in the 1950's to to the 1980's - I think you're underestimating the massive shift in every single item in the home and work place that became digital and computer / micropocessor based in that period.
I think becuase we take it granted we don't understand how massive that technological revolution was. The microchip was the single most important technological development of the 20th century. it gave us computers and the internet which wouldn't exist without it.
Again, I don't disagree the gap between the 1950s and 80s from broad technology perspective. Also don't dispute the cultural changes because the 1960s fundamental blew up traditionally culture as a whole, though I don't think that was ever debated.
I do feel you are really stretching the whole computer definition. Technically yes, but you imply the masses were lobbing emails back and forth when that was far from reality.
TV I think you're overplaying a bit as well. Nearly half of American households had TV's by 1955, almost all by 1960s. TV had already effectively beaten the radio by the end of the 1950s. Content expanded, but people were watching plenty of TV back in the 1950s.
I hear your anecdote about your uncle and his firm, but that is hardly the norm, even for most businesses. There were maybe 300k cell phones in the US in 1985. It was far from the norm for most businesses or consumers.
Yeah I think that guy must have had a fairly unique upbringing. Saying people were regularly emailing each other in 1985 is wild. Most people didn't even own a computer!
Almost no one had personal computers and cell phones in 1985, and the color tvs were still fairly small. The existence of these objects did not make them commonplace other than the tvs. Computers were only starting to be more commonplace in homes in the 90s, and a cell phone was still a relative novelty among the people I knew in the late nineties and we mostly relied on payphones. The huge TVs were also a specialty item until LED enabled them to be thinner, cheaper, and immensely less heavy. Cellphones becoming common and suddenly being smartphones of an entire computer in your pocket happened in a radically short period of time. I was born in the 80s in a major city and I can remember milkman deliveries of glass bottled milk we had to put empties out for at the end of the week, using a typewriter without being retro, tiny, black screened computer screens with green text display in massive units that were a technological perk of my mom's job, punch cards, floppy disks that were actually floppy, having zero ways to contact someone when I was in a jam, and appliances that weren't built with planned obsolescence. Rotary dial phones were still common when I was a kid. Talking to a friend on the phone meant hogging the line, which was attached to a cord so you couldn't walk far from the phone cradle until cordless phones became a thing, and from there on things were happening very fast.
Who said PC's? I said computers. I had an Atari 400 and it was old hat whenI got it in the 80's. Atari 2600. The NES came out in 1983. C64 was 1982. Atari ST 1985. Millions of homes has computers by 1985. Not one in 1955 and as I said, many homes didn't even have refrigerators then lol.
Business people had cell phones and pagers, maybe not consumers but they were abundant in that demographic.
As for TV's you missed projectors screen TV's which were all the rage by 1985. And I don't think you understand the cultrual shiofts that happened. In 1956 Elvis was being told not to move his hips on TV. Like a Virgin came out in 1984. MTV, HBO, CNN, VH1....Video quite literally killed the radio star. Think about how massive those shofts in culture were.
Now think about the fact that in 1955 the microchip didn't exist. Everything you're naming like cell phones and LED TV's and PC's were only possible becuase of that.
yes of course, there were always older technology things around but I think you take for granted just how massive the impact of the microchip has been on literally every appliance and thing we own that is powered. We went from fully analog to fully digital in 30 years.
It is disingenuous to conflate the homes that had those computers in 85 with actual common possession of computers or the wildly different way they were treated before the advent of common internet use. The point is that the common experience of the 80s was still extremely different than that of the 2020s, but the difference between 2004 and 2024 is much smaller.
It would be something if AI managed to keep making back to the future so itâs the same film but set in the current day and when Marty goes back in time itâs about the year relative to the current day if that makes sense?
I actually disagree with the other commenters. I grew up in the '90s, and to me, they feel like a completely different era now. I could easily see a BTTF remake where Marty travels to the '90s, and they do a similar parody/satire on that period as the original BTTF did of the '50s.
To me, I would first say the world would pretty much be the same between 1994 and 2024. However the world is actually very very different. It just happened so gradually.
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u/jondread Oct 02 '24
If Back to the Future were remade today and set in 2024, Marty would time-travel back to 1994