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Originally Posted by DMB
I love reading history and am currently shuttling between two books: this one and this. They both seem very good as far as I've read.
But I often wonder how people then felt about the times they were living through. They didn't wake up one day and say, "Oh, it's the Renaissance now, let's clear out all that mediaeval dead wood!". They were aware of things changing but saw everything as a continuum.
My husband and I are both in our 70s and have lived through various decades: the 40s, the 50s, the 60s right up to the teens of this century. Decades are in themselves an artificial construct and we can't see huge divisions anywhere along our path. But when I see film of the 1940s now, I'm struck by how different everything looked and how different people's assumptions were.
Does anyone here see obvious divisions? How do you think people a couple of hundred years in the future will see it? |
This is a great question. And thanks for pointing out those books!
I'm still young - I could be your grandkid.
But now in my 20's, I'm beginning to see what will soon be "historical." And things have changed.
It's so slow, and you really have to think about it to see it. But even simple things - music, clothes, have changed significantly.
Science has changed drastically. We're inches from curing cancer and AIDS. We're ripping pieces from atoms with freakish precision. We have robots that are smart enough to do basic office work. We can grow body parts, and we're close to being able to use them for transplants, eliminating the need for health-destroying immune suppressant drugs. We have stem cell therapy and bionic limbs. We didn't have any of these things when I was a little kid.
Technology, which I suppose is related, also a drastic change. I remember playing Doom on my dad's computer as a toddler. Computers were monsters then, with only a couple hundred pixels on even the biggest of monitors. Now, I carry around a computer that's a thousand times more powerful than the computer I played Doom on, and it weighs less than 3 pounds. And the internet? Nothing but a geek chatroom, back then.
But there's more than that. This is an important era. Some of the things I've seen will make the history books.
I was in London when the economy collapsed. It happened so fast - Liverpool Street went from bustling to dead in 48 hours. The pound imploded, losing 50 cents of its value pretty much overnight. I stood at street level, looking up, watching frantic people in the financial buildings. And I know that 50 years, 100 years, from now, children in the UK will be learning about what I saw that day.
I went to OccupyMN the other day, as a reporter. It was my second update. My first article beat the Star Tribune by 6 hours. And I know that someday, that will be in the history books too. Probably not my article, but my article will be in the mountains of information about what happened here. It will be one of the first accounts of the movement coming to Minnesota. And I was there.
We live in an era where everything is changing. Apart from the economy, and related to the topic of this site, media is changing. Everything is moving online, and with it, former leviathans are being crushed under the weight of their own resistance to change, and artists are just beginning to find a louder voice, now that the giants are falling out of their way. Art is undergoing a revolution. I see the future as bright for artists. These rocky years are to be expected, and it's going to be uncomfortable for several more years to come. But when the dust settles, the landscape of expression and media will be completely changed.
I'm coming into adulthood at such an important and historical time. This may sound weird, but I was a weird kid who tended to hang out with adults and was fairly current with what was going on around me. I remember as a child, I was sitting in the car with my dad. I was around 8 - it was the mid 90's. I turned to him and said, "Why is there nothing going on? There's all this noise but nothing important happening, no one really doing anything." I didn't articulate it well, but what I was trying to say is that I didn't see your average Joe being involved in any sort of dialogue about the world he lives in.
The 90's were, for your average American, a placid time to live. Something in me enjoys a good fight, and I found that boring. I find that pointless. Life has no meaning to me if there's not something that needs changing, and I'm not doing something to help it along. The 90's was a pointless decade for someone like me.
I had no idea it was the calm before a storm. And I wonder what people will think of the times we now live in when I'm your age.