technological change

[calimac]

ladyofastolat wrote about technological change. This was my comment:

Not so much the technological changes, but the social changes, in society over the first half of the 20C have always fascinated me. The 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s are all so profoundly different from one another, and it's always startling to find a person famous in just one of those periods in the wrong era, even though of course they had to be alive then. Young Eleanor Roosevelt in an Edwardian dress! That sort of thing.

Of course it's a lot harder to feel that for your own lifetime. The 1970s are as long ago now as the 1930s were then, but it doesn't feel that way (though it does explain why older people then talked about the 1930s as if they were a lot more immediate than they felt to me). The fact that the standard 1970s relic of today is things like faded color photos of people in disco clothes makes a difference, because I remember the era unfaded, and know that most people didn't wear disco clothes.

A few dates on internet advance:
1) I first used a computer with an online connection in the fall of 1980. (It was an early library union catalog, available only to workers at the library, and I found it fascinating.)
2) I first used e-mail in 1992. (It wasn't my own account; I had to send messages on a tech worker's. It was to make arrangements to meet someone on my upcoming trip to England. How much easier it was to do it this way then a time-consuming exchange of letters, or finding a mutually convenient time for a phone call, not to mention that long-distance calls were EXPENSIVE back then.) E-mail was still a techie thing back then, though it gradually changed by the end of the decade. SF conventions used to hold what were called "@ parties", open to anyone who knew what that was. That wasn't a lot of people.
3) I first saw the web in about January 1994. I was ushered into an office at work and shown the White House web site, which had a sound clip of Socks the cat meowing. My reaction was, "bring me back when there's something useful."
4) That took about 3-4 years. It was 1998 or 99 when I started ordering books on Amazon. This was also the time when Google came along in beta. Before that time you COULD NOT count on finding anything on the web unless you already had its URL. Earlier search facilities were only sometimes helpful and wearying to use.
5) The first news event I followed primarily on the web was 9/11. I was so glad to abandon TV news. People talk about being clobbered with those clips of the plane hitting the building; but I never saw the clip, only still photos, until I watched Michael Moore's movie years later.
6) It was about that time, also, that Wikipedia morphed from being a few random articles by punters into a real reference source. Prior to that time, the web was not a useful source for general reference information, only for info available from organizations with a web site (which still wasn't all of them) or for things that you knew that some dedicated person had bothered to upload themselves, and that you could trust their accuracy.

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A couple more additions. That long-distance phone calls used to be very expensive (with costs ratcheted sharply by distance) and that the web wasn't free-text searchable until Google was added are two examples of profound changes in the usability of the world that may not come to mind under technology, but are profoundly important to an understanding of change. Others include the profound increase in the sophistication of TV series drama after VCRs came along and missing an episode no longer meant you were out of luck until summer re-runs, and the profound changes in the contents of grocery store shelves wreaked by the microwave oven.

I'd like to keep a list of other examples, though I don't have a single place in my mind for them. Ones that come to mind, at least for US use, include:
1) Social groups used to organize "phone trees" to pass news around;
2) Laser pointers existed for several years before it was generally realized they make great cat toys;
3) Coins used to be actually useful, instead of just markers for fractional values: as late as the 1970s, there were still 10- or 25-cent candy bars;
4) Self-service gas stations were essentially unknown until the mid-70s, likewise the convenience stores with them; for that matter, the self-service grocery was an invention of the early 20C;
5) Before about 1970, toll bridges in the Bay Area charged tolls in both directions, until some genius realized you could make nearly the same amount of money at half the cost by charging twice as much in only one direction;
6) Before ATMs, the only way to get money out of a bank was by being there during "banker's hours", a strange curtailment that disappeared about the same time. Banker's hours were something like 9 or 10 am to 3 or 4 pm, sometimes with an hour omitted for lunch, except on Friday when they'd stay open until 6. No weekends.
And that's not even getting into the changes related to the status of minorities and women. (Yes, newspaper help wanted ads were still segregated by sex during my own lifetime.) Any more?

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

You mention buying books from Amazon, but that's just the tip of the internet commerce iceberg. Now if you want a rare book, you just do a quick search for it. People still browse used book stores, but it's no longer the Holy Grail search. I often turn to the internet rather than searching store after store for many other items too. I remember rejoycing when I realized I could buy CDs online rather than having to endure the staff's musical taste at a local store while searching vainly for a CD that might have been filed in one of many categories (is it folk or world or new age or . . . ?)

And CDs, for that matter, which are now transitioning to downloads only for many people. CDs that used to be so expensive, but now any band that stays together for 6 months puts one out.

Word processing/desktop publishing and all that that has given rise to. Books written on computer, email submissions of manuscripts, huge changes in the publishing industry.

Desktop photocopiers! How many hours I spent at Kinko's making photocopies. But that was a huge innovation over not being able to make copies at all.

Sorry, I seem to be going down a rabbit hole of things we use computers for. But I still am astonished at the power we have at our fingertips now, and how easy it has been to get used to it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, these are also good examples.

Rare-book buying I considered a bit esoteric to mention separately (although most of the people who read this do it): the first time I looked up an OP book I'd been long wanting but not finding, discovered a copy in Sault Ste. Marie, and fired off an order, I exclaimed, "It's like shooting fish in a barrel!"

I could tell separately how the gradual disappearance of pay phones finally convinced me to buy a cell phone. The early history of telephony and how it came to be accepted by the public when it was new is another fascinating historical story.

Photocopiers are an interesting example, because while if you look up the history of the things you'll find they've been around since 1960, those of us who remember those days know that, as a casual everyday thing, photocopying didn't exist until the mid-70s, and then mostly in specialized places, like around college campuses and in business offices.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I remember having to go to a place that made blueprints, to get a photocopy. Then in the 1970s doing neighborhood activism with mimeographs that the local college kindly let us make, while tactfully looking away from the content.