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?
Smoking cigarettes isn’t just not cool anymore, You’re actually likely to be socially ostracized in a lot of countries where it used to be popular. My perspective is the US, which is a very clear example of this.
Weed, however, is way more accepted. To the point where if I’m using a vape I almost feel a social pressure to clarify to people I’m getting high and not smoking nicotine.
It’s rather funny when you think about it
The circa 1990 nature of American society has been erased so completely that it is hard to believe how drastically it has changed.
Movies used to depict child molestation (Indiana Jones) or outright rape (Revenge of the Nerds) as normal and to be celebrated when it was done by the heroes. A lot of crimes got viewed through the lens of whether it was “our people” doing them. The thinking features in a lot of old movies.
The cops who beat Rodney King were found not guilty by a jury, in the first trial. After all, they’re the cops, they’re allowed. Drunk driving was fine, as long as you were one of the right kind of people. The cops would beat the fuck out of people and it was fine. The factory in town could be polluting the river and it was fine as long as dad had a job. And so on.
The uniformity of thought that TV enforced, before the internet, is really not well understood. If you thought Israel was bad, then you and Noam Chomsky were literally the only ones. Even as late in the arc as the Iraq War, I would say about 95% of the people who didn’t get their news from the internet supported the war. Watch one of the debates where Ron Paul was speaking against the war with everyone else (except the audience) just weirded out and confused by it, or the “Media-Opoly” short that aired on SNL once and then never again, to get some idea by contrast of how airtight the lock on narrative used to be. TV and newspapers are still kind of that way, but they don’t have the media monopoly they used to. It used to be that someone probably would live their entire adult life without ever hearing the kind of political viewpoints you see every day on Lemmy as normal things.
On the other hand, along with the expectation that everyone was kind of a piece of shit and that’s how life is, came a kind of backbone for resistance that I feel like is missing today. Woodstock ‘99 would be a pretty normal “yeah they robbed us” badly organized festival today. It was way better than the Fyre Festival, and people at Fyre just took it, or called their lawyers. At Woodstock ‘99, the kids threw bottles and batteries at Kurt Loder, broke in the ATMs and stole their money back, and then ripped the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground.
The cops who beat Rodney King were found not guilty by a jury, in the first trial. After all, they’re the cops, they’re allowed. [snip] The cops would beat the fuck out of people and it was fine.
This hasn’t really changed though.
It absolutely has. Before Rodney King it was always fine. From 1992 to about 2014 it was mostly fine. From 2014-2020, it was a debate, and after 2020, they’re pretty much always guilty. There’s a whole interesting conversation to be had about why it was that all kinds of riot and peaceful protest had basically 0 result until 2014-2020, and then in 2020 it all of a sudden starting working significantly.
Anyway, now under Trump, some of the reform is going backwards. There were some outlier departments that were still in the 1992 mode, and the feds were doing some things to try to come down on them, whereas now it’s the opposite, Trump is actively pardoning dirty cops. Great stuff.
It was not fine. There was a whole riot about it and everything.
The only thing that’s changed recently is that cops can occasionally be held accountable if they cause enough embarrassment to the powers that be.
Can you name three incidents since 2020 where the cops have not been charged? I know of one, and even that one has an asterisk next to it. Before 2020 it was multiple every year, there used to be these massive walls with names written on them.
but back then it was “fine” because it never made the news…
When I was in high school, gay was the generic negative word. If Wendys gave you a medium fry when you ordered a large - gay. If your homie cancelled plans last minute - gay. If you slipped on the stairs and busted your ass - gay. It’s bizarre in hindsight.
Kids are still mean, they just use different words now
Yeah. The way bullying happens seems to have changed since my time.
Same. “Gay Humor” is a thing, probably still a thinh. If you act feminine as a guy, its “gay”. If you act too emotional over a girl, it’s “gay”. If you answer a question wrong, your a [R-Slur]. Every you had a slight problem with is a “bitch” even the guys. Sometime the occational gay word equivalent that starts with “f”.
Oh this is a blue city btw. Circa 2015-2020
The way retard has changed over the years is wild to me. Cause around me there are large communities of people with mental and physical disabilities who aggressively try to tell people that they are infact retarded. It’s the word they grew up with and are fighting tooth and nail to keep it from turning into a slur. Even tho it’s been used as one against those very people for years.
It’s such a weird thing to watch from the side line. Makes me wonder if this is what it was like during the rise of rap and the n word.
Tho it’s also getting to the point there’s so many letter-slurs that it’s getting stupid. At some point feels like we are going to have to either just stop caring and accept that intentions matter more then the words them self. Else we are goanna run out of letters to describe slurs.
Makes it very hard to have meaningful discourse around the topic. To be fair the fear of bans, and punishment for even saying some words regardless of context or topic also just makes it very iffy to talk about this topic in many places.
Hell iv seen people banned on etymology fourms and subs because someone said a “letter” slur with in the context of explaining the origin of the word. It’s crazy what the internet has become recently.
Yea that one got me by surprise. Not sure when it changed, but a few years back a friend told me I offended someone by using it.
I was confused - stopped using it though.
That’s cringe dude
The rednecks around me have taught their children to use “gay” as an insult
Outside of formal settings, I’d say that it’s uncommon for women to wear skirts or dresses in day-to-day life now.
Menswear is considerably more casual. This is a trend that’s been going for over a century or so, so it certainly didn’t just happen during my life, but it did significantly change in that time.
I was a nurse in the US from 2015-2020 and in that time I saw one “old school” nurse who wore a white scrubs dress and white stockings/shoes. Every day that I saw her she was dressed this way so it wasn’t like for an event or something. Just working on the L&D floor. No hat though. Honestly no idea how anyone did the job of nursing in a damn dress anyway but they all did for a very long time before I was in the profession. Every time I saw her I was just jealous that she must not be cleaning up like, ANY shit where she works. For graduation we all wore the little hat, then that was the end of that forever.
In the states anyway, our sense of community has almost vanished. Rather than concerning ourselves with improving society, we have become a nation of de facto sovereign citizens, all is us competing with everyone else.
Even common courtesy has gone down the shitter. On the roads, at retail establishments, everything is a fight. Shove your way past everyone or you’re weak.
Isolation of individuals and the growing loss of ownership of, well, everything.
- People are way more free to talk about their mental health problems.
- Climate change is part of mainstream awareness, most people want to see action on it.
- Gays and lesbians are very broadly accepted in many parts of the world. Trans people are too (and they are more visible), even if there is also a culture war backlash.
- Nearly everyone hates capitalism. Not everyone has figured out what needs to be done about it, but it’s a good start.
- Conspiracy thinking is more rampant, presumably because of internet (mis/dis)information bubbles
(I was born in the early 80s, so this is over the last 30ish years, since the mid 90s)
People are way more free to talk about their mental health problems.
People still don’t understand.
“Just be happy” is still a thing.
I didn’t say it was perfect. Just better. And I’m sure it’s improved more in some places than others.
No more milk delivered each morning to my door.
When I was a kid, it was common for members of parliament to vote freely per their riding with whipped votes being limited to confidence votes.
Now, thanks to Stephen Harper going hard on the precedent set by Jean Chretien, free votes basically don’t exist in parliament.
I think for me in my country it would be the collapse of the social contract. The bonds that society regulates itself.
Is sex different? It seems like sex has changed in society. Like, more openness, less taboo. But also conservative sexual beliefs seem to be pulling harder in the opposite direction.
It is now no longer social suicide to not drink.
And it’s not that hard either. I’m out with a new group of people and just ask “do you drink?” If I get a “no” we know not to push it and just continue on like normal. They still join in with all the conversation, we keep discussions around favorite drinks, alcohol, etc light to none and no one is offended or bothered.
Sometimes I forget that smoking is a thing, and then (after sometimes a whole year) I see someone doing it, and I’m like, “woah, people still smoke.” It was everywhere when I was a kid—even inside restaurants.
It always surprises me that pot smoking is now worse. Don’t get me wrong: go ahead with your vice. But the world used to smell like an ash tray and now it smells like skunk. Realistically the world doesn’t stink as much, which is excellent, but that means pot smokers really stand out as annoying stink
“Nonsmoking section” that wasn’t even a separate room, just a half wall divider 🫠
Lol, in my tiny ass hometown it was just tables without ashtrays.
before that, it was the whole restaurant
When I was a kid, it was assumed that boys asked girls to dances and not the other way around. In the recent Pixar series Dream Productions, a tween girl is asked who she’s going to ask to the school dance. It’s now treated as normal for girls to ask boys. She also ends up not going with a date and just going with her friends.
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
I got started on the Internet in 1988. You had to learn Unix (Linux didn’t exist yet) and the command line (GUI Internet didn’t exist yet), and had to manually piece together files to download them (www didn’t exist yet).
Gods, and I felt I was early. I used gopher pre-www, and definitely had interacted with computers by 88, but interacting with networking by that time was virtually unheard of outside of academic or defense settings.
