seriously, I would bring a book wherever I went. these people are intellectual voids

Boomers, Gen Xers and elder millennials are now the last people who remember what it was like to use a pay phone, a paper map, a typewriter, etc. — and they’re being rapidly outnumbered by younger adults who don’t.

younger millennials and even elder zoomers remember those things, at least the pay phones if nothing else

I’m a YM and I’ve used all of those things

Do you have some kind of portable device that allows others to instantaneously reach you?

I don’t like how the author said this, I but kinda agree with what they are getting at. Any time I’m in a line or waiting for something, I just pull out my phone and amuse myself. Before smart phones, in those situations I was usually just alone with my thoughts. I’m now at the point that being alone with my thoughts can make me a bit fidgety and uncomfortable.

As if the same people who get angry at you for looking at your phone wouldn’t also beat the shit out of you if you pulled out a book. As if you could just pull out a book in line. Do you carry a backpack literally everywhere? Most people don’t, hence what the author said.

Also, reading a book takes quite a bit more commitment, and you’re a little less connected to the environment when you do it.

I think they still watch a similar amount. They just also have their phones out now

there’s a pop-sociology book written in the 80s, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, that convincingly argues against the dominance of mass media. It has some major flaws, which I will allow you to discover for yourself, but its conclusions are very compelling and I think it provides some useful tools for evaluating the deluge of “informative” content.

Shoplifting is actually easier now cause most stores don’t want the liability that comes with physically apprehending shoplifters. Most of them still have “Loss Prevention” but they don’t have cuffs anymore and aren’t supposed to touch you. And local PD usually doesn’t care enough to investigate someone who they don’t have in custody when they call.

I’d always have a portable CD player or radio and would get to be the navigator during family roadtrips and read from the map book

I would have a CD player, book, and GBA/DS on me at all times in high school. Never had an issue with boredom until I got a smartphone. Now it’s constantly fighting for my attention and preventing me from do things I want to do

If you’re not addicted to ordering food delivery and social media there’s really no need for one outside of maybe job requirements.

renting final fantasy 2 at blockbuster that had an end game save on it

There were those printed guides for the bigger games. I remember walking down to the mall and checking the guide when I got stuck in Tomb Raider 2. Gamefaqs has been around since 1995, I wasn’t online til, I think 98 or 99.

Nowadays kids just have Tunic smh

Your library of self-made notebooks were the pelts on the wall of your past game conquests.

One thing that I think is really interesting to consider is how the information landscape has changed and what implications that has.

Before the internet and the prevalence of the “modern” internet, if you wanted to learn about something (especially if it was very new), then you almost certainly had to be exposed to PR to learn about it. This is especially true if you weren’t an academic, so the majority of people.

I think this allowed marketing and PR to have a really captive audience especially because the lag in information was much longer. A news article could run in print media in under 24 hours with a narrative and the message would disseminate amongst people and the next turnaround time for something rebutting or debunking this narrative would be at least another 24 hours, assuming a different journalist was capable of producing an opinion piece with a really quick turnaround time or someone like a commentator or expert might be able to do the same in a letter to the editor (where they would get a tiny column that a lot of newspaper readers wouldn’t even bother to read). But in realistic terms it might take a week or a month or longer for a countervailing narrative to emerge if people needed to hear about the article, track it down, do some independent research, and produce something that they might have to shop around in order to get it published somewhere. And then that countervailing narrative often has a lag time where it needs to circulate amongst people, often fairly gradually.

It was much easier for people to get hyped up on bullshit products or services and to be spun a lie or a carefully curated half-truth that could take root long before something more evenhanded and reflective of reality could begin to supplant it. If that latter part ever happened at all.

Now the way that marketing and PR has to function, as well as the thing I’m going to refer to as “narrative curation” (think stuff like Wikipedia or review sites which aren’t actually PR but which aggregate info and which tend to preference certain information while deemphasizing other info in a conscious way), is largely very different because the speed at which information travels, the hugely expanded access/ready-accesss to information (yes, technically anybody could go to their local library immediately after receiving info to fact-check and develop a deeper understanding [as long as it was open] but in effect nobody was really doing that and so ease of access is at least as important to consider as a theoretical level of access), and the way that sources of information have been… I don’t want to say decentralised because that’s not accurate, but more like proliferated or something.

It’s also interesting that another major difference is that this older model of information access meant that we structured ourselves to this access, in the sense that people would need to schedule their time around getting the news broadcast or they would have to listen to the radio program at the time that the radio program was playing.

Now I think that we have a situation where our schedule is not structured to our access to information anymore but, because our info access is on-demand, we are structured by our information access in the sense that the boundaries of time and place on information are mostly dissolved and so we become the demographics that are distinguished by how we primarily access our info - think the person who gets their news and politics from streamers on twitch vs the person who gets their opinions shaped by R*ddit comments and moderators vs the people who get their info from their TikTok feed, for example - and then this creates marketing profiles and algorithms that then dictate what info gets served to us; before this, the vast majority of people in the UK would watch the BBC and so there wasn’t really a BBC “demographic” that you could describe in any particular detail. It was “British person who owns a TV and regularly watches it as their main source of info and entertainment”, or virtually every British person.

I don’t know where that leaves us.

I guess I’m just going to say that cultural critique is fascinating and all that but it’s mostly just a sideshow and the really important stuff is our material reality so, idk, join a party and get involved in your community or spend your time reading theory instead of thinking about what I’ve said as being anything more than a curious bit of musing rather than (partly) uncovering some deep truth.

The difference is smaller if you consider that when you don’t know what you want, you are not getting positive results from using any technology anyway.

So back then when you don’t know what you want, you don’t get anything. Now you get exhausting useless activities to kill time. You even start killing time you could use better.

I do remember people considered “in the know” were much more savvy with consumer protective information. Reviews were treated as reviews from relative or expert opinion rather than validation of taste. There were also options for children, teens (the magazine “Zillions” for example, my first taste of criticizing capitalism provided by Consumer Reports for kids), adults and the elderly.

Now, there’s a much less robust testing, renting, reviewing and demoing environment it feels.

When you were a kid your friends would be the neighbors due to proximity more than anything else. If you lived in the suburbs your parents probably knew the names and occupations of every person on your street. If you wanted to hang out or play you’d physically walk to the kids house and knock on the door.

When you were older and capable of driving or using other transit by yourself, you’d make plans with people at school, specify a time and place, and then that was pretty much it - you’d go there and have to be punctual and meet them. In contrast plans these days are always temporary and transitory since people can text each other in real time and say they’re running late etc.

Wanting to ask a girl out but having to talk to her parents first to get her on the line.

Well, yes, pre-internet is too much. But pre-Web2.0 is just better.

Generations of kids hiding them from their parents or something more sinister?

I remember always reading books. Now I read posts from communists sitting on toilets

the tall man in the forest

Come again?

finding a quarter and buying a soda with it

I remember quarter sodas, so nice. Soda now is like $6 a can so forget it.

Those plastic games were probably Tiger handheld games, and they fucking blew

I’ve always argued that it also depended on your economic upbringing. I’m right on the cusp of millennial, but my parents couldn’t afford internet until my junior year of high school. Yeah, the internet existed but it might as well not have, outside of someone bringing halo to school on a usb I missed most of it.

you could, but home internet rates were still pretty low well into the 2000s

Mostly we were LAN cafeing in 2000, broadband wasnt good enough or common enough yet.

$10 overnight LANs were the best.

but you could go home and frag some noobs

A wide smile.