Was it fascinating? Did it feel like the amazing future? Were you all too aware of the mounting cost relative to what you were actually doing?
Was it fascinating? Did it feel like the amazing future? Were you all too aware of the mounting cost relative to what you were actually doing?
Absolutely, though it went beyond the news. Culture in general was much more monolithic. You could start a conversation with any random person about the previous evening’s episode of Gunsmoke or MASH or Cheers and there was a very good chance they had watched it. It’s hard to overstate how much more diverse culture has become in the Internet era, for better and for worse.
That’s interesting - I didn’t experience the advent of the internet like that, probably because I’m from a fairly multicultural background and travelled at lot at that time. I lived near DC for a few months in 1976 and went on a three-week road trip around California in 1990 and did notice how isolated from the rest of the world Americans in general seemed, especially outside the big cities. I was a real novelty, exotic even, and I’m a white cis het woman. Just with a funny accent, from a country they’d never heard of.
I grew up in the rural US, and my family was acquainted with a family who lived in a neighboring state and had a summer home nearby.
They were so exotic, yes. Just looking at a car with a plate from a different state was a novelty. I wish I’d been bold enough to talk with them myself, but then again my mother probably would have discouraged it.
When I was first working, my officemate was from that state, and I was kind of impressed that he’d made the globe-trotting jet-setting move of coming to a whole other state. (No, I’d never been to another state myself at the time.)