Back to the Future, Time Travel, and the Secret History of the 1980s
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I wonder if there's something different though? I knew little about the 50's when I was in high school. None of my peers were "into" the 50's, and nobody was listening to music from the 50's. But my current students still love 80's metal bands like Metallica and Slayer, and 80's hip hop like NWA and others. They like 80's movies, and will have quote battles about 80's movies.
Maybe 1985 doesn't feel as far away to them, or as irrelevant, as 1955 felt to me.
I think you're 100% right, 1985 doesn't feel like ancient history at all.
I was born at 1980, and that's exactly how I felt by the 90's time (that the 80's were the beginning of the "modern" world).
Maybe it's because it's true. There was a cultural transformation at the 70's, so that the 80's were completely different from the 60's. We didn't have any other such transformatio after that.
S&L and the housing crash could be seen as defining the pattern that the boom/bust cycle has followed since then.
Opinions are, by definition, subjective, and the issue here is a subjective question of feeling, not an objective question of fact, so, yes, its impossible for anyone to have an "objective opinion" about it, for a few fairly fundamental reasons. (And its not just limited to people on HN.)
If some of the older posters (40-60 rather than 20-30) were to post a similar sentiment about the 80s then it would say more.
Edit: Alternatively, I'm very likely just projecting my age range on some posters who are in that age range, but them chiming up to confirm that fact would be helpful.
Let me try to give a different perspective, though: Modern times seems to me to have started about when The Matrix came out and Google came along. It's truly amazing to me that we managed to get along without immediate and virtually unlimited access to any information about anything. Being able to just look things up completely changed my life. The internet was qualitatively enormously different when the best search engine was Altavista and most of my time was spent on IRC and Usenet.
We knew about the 1950s from "Happy Days" which, in retrospect was analogous to "Freaks and Geeks" for my generation. The difference was that the media was obsessed with the baby boomers in a way that they never were about Gen X. The baby boomer history and progress was in our face all the time and I couldn't wait to be old and have them mostly be dead so I could stop getting media progress reports on them.
I think the modern media goes back to the early 1970s. Some movies and some music from then seems pretty current still. Earlier than that things seem increasingly weird and foreign.
That is purely a result of your experience. You were probably a teenager in the early 80s, so you began paying attention to popular culture when the 70s music was still frequently played on pop stations.
In contrast BTW, I think television from back then seems bizarre and old.
But you go back to the 70s and with a few exceptions, e.g. MAS*H, they start to look considerably different and less watchable by a modern audience except as cultural artifacts.
The proliferation of options for people to watch has forced an upgrade in the quality of the writing.
Of course, there's plenty of crap on TV today, but I'm talking about the good stuff from each era. Yes, Twilight Zone was good. I think it was quite an anomaly.
There's an incredible amount of bad programming on today, in my opinion of course. See any Kardashian-esque reality TV program.
I can't watch very popular programs like Big Bang Theory. I find the laugh tracks and lousy one liners unbearable. If something is funny I'll know it and laugh. I don't need a cue.
Well, Sturgeon's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
The crap today is crap in different ways from older television but I'd argue what's good is very, very good. And frankly, if you can give me a handful of hours of quality television a week, I'm happy. Give me much more than that and I'm not going to watch it anyway. If there's a greater percentage of poor TV today, it's probably because there are more time slots that need to be filled cheaply but whether it's 99% crap or 99.9% crap doesn't really affect me.
I never got into Big Bang Theory and have pretty much lost my taste for sitcoms generally in any case. I'm not sure I'd even get into Seinfeld today although it was pretty much a cultural touchstone at the time.
Those tend to be pretty good, I agree. I watch them on Me TV sometimes. (Digital subchannels are what UHF and cable were Back In The Day: Cheap timeslots filled with whatever someone has to hand.) However, they're good writing one episode at a time. These days, you get good writing a season at a time; it allows more characterization, more complex plots, and more flavor. Breaking Bad is a novel-length plot, something TV only did in soap opera form back then. And soap operas have never been accused of having good writing.
Also in the mid 70s, you had the rise of the modern high-concept blockbuster, with films such as JAWS and STAR WARS. Not to mention the advent of the modern superhero movie with SUPERMAN. Those changes have definitely held on until today, and shape not just the content, but also the form of much of modern movies.
There really was a qualitative change in movies around 1970, so it's not unusual if someone can relate more to movies from that point onward.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood
and
This how I feel about millennials. Unfortunately, since I am one of them, I can't just wait for them to go away.
Extra notable to the discussion is that both "That 80s Show" and "Freaks and Geeks" failed to catch on. I never saw any of either, so they might have just been bad (though at the very least Freaks and Geeks seems to have been looked upon positively), but I wonder if it wasn't representative of the fact that we still feel that the 80s are more or less the modern era, in a way that wasn't the case prior to that, and so there's less to have nostalgia about.
Of course it could also just be that there were crappy examples of that kind of show throughout TV history that we just don't remember.
e.g. 'WWII in color' films make things feel remarkably more relatable than B/W footage
Wouldn't be surprised if we see a similar change, if not more dramatic, if/when VR becomes a more prevalent form of media
30 years from now kids will occasionally stumble upon youtube videos made today, and they will look exactly the same as when they were made. Possibly better if upscaling algorithms improve and are more common.
Between 1955-1985 we had the civil rights movement, the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and the final decades of the Cold War. Between 1985-2015 we've had the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, and 9/11. I'm obviously missing some other significant events.
We also had technological shifts - 1955-1985 saw records -> tapes, but CDs and PCs were not quite massively adopted yet. 1985-2015 has seen CDs -> flash storage, mass adoption of PCs -> laptops -> smartphones, and social media apps. Much of the advances in technology have connected us geographically and temporally.
I feel like the significant events between 1955-1985 separated the youth of the 80's from the youth of the 50's, more than the significant events from 1985-2015 have. I also feel that many changes between 1985-2015 actually connected today's youth to people and events of the last 30 years.
That might be part of it, but I think a lot of it is just that the Baby Boomers are the worst generation in history, while today's younger folks are…just younger folks.
Why do you think so?
Socially and culturally however I think they achieved many great things we take for granted (birth control access, environmentalism, civil rights advances, multiculturalism, the sexual revolution, etc).
PCs weren't really mainstream in 1985 (though C64s and the like were relatively common)
Hardly any consumer PC could connect to the pre-WWW Internet. And I'm not sure a lot connected to online services in general. (As I recall, a service like CIS had hefty per-minute charges at the time.)
So relatively few consumers had email or any way to get information online.
VCRs existed but I'm not sure how widespread they were; I know I didn't have one until the late 80s so there was relatively little timeshifting. Cable TV was fairly widespread though.
Few had mobile phones and air charges would have been significant. Answering machines were readily available but I don't know what the penetration was.
Anyway, my basic point is that the mainstream consumer would find the pre-eighties and the post-eighties to be enormously different world from a technology perspective, especially with respect to communications. I frequently think if I were to go back to my job in 1986, I'd throw up my hands in horror at my inability to do my work--given the difficulty of getting information and generally communicating (though we did have internal email).
A C64 was a PC (sensu latu) and the latest Dell/Compaq octo-core gaming rig is a PC, so same-same. Name hasn't changed, so the massive technical advance is hidden.
The BBS networks were networks and the Internet is a network, so they're the same. Never mind the fact BBS networks were lucky to get email across the country in a few days whereas Internet users can chat real-time with full voice and video around the world.
Cell phones existed in 1985. Cell phones exist now. Guess which devices can access global databases in a fraction of a second and which devices were bags which had handsets wired to them so people could make and receive phone calls from their cars!! Again, though, the name remains the same.
People in 1985 had cheap cameras. People in 2015 have... cell phones.
People in 1985 had little black books with phone numbers in them. People in 2015 have... cell phones.
People in 1985 had really nifty digital watches. People in 2015 have... cell phones.
(Really, though, the fact cell phones have kept the same name is pretty amazing, given how radically the devices themselves have changed.)
...synced to really nifty digital watches.
But you just gave me a great product idea. Wifi accessible infra red remote controls that you'd mount in various rooms in the house that contain IR-remote controlled objects (TVs, ceiling fans, etc) along with an app to control them from your handheld.
Now we think nothing of calling somewhere, as long as somewhere is "within civilization" - even if it's a materially poor, remote area. It's easy to find goods online, even relatively obscure ones. And if we have a question about a specialized field, we can usually find some online source that can point us in the right direction.
What we haven't really done yet is reorganize the economy to make good use of all these new efficiencies. We still manufacture and market as before, just using some additional channels.
I would say the cultural and technological shifts between 55 and 85 were far bigger.
In 55 space travel was in its infancy, segregation still existed, jet planes were in their infancy, computers were in their infancy. The impact of consumer technology was really the family TV and the car.
In a lot of ways today is just a evolutionary version of 1985, whereas 1985 was mich more of a revolution from 1955.
I think the time is right for another sequel - jumping forward to 2045.
It also doesn't focus as much on television, except to the extent that people in 1955 apparently didn't know what a "rerun" was. (Did they in reality? Honestly don't know.) The other side to that is, back in 1985, if you wanted to see an old episode of I Love Lucy or Gunsmoke (which had actually gone off the air by then, I believe) you either caught the rerun of the one episode some network was broadcasting or you were SOL. I'm not sure anyone was even selling video tapes of episodes back then, even assuming you were one of the comparatively few people to have a VHS or Beta player. Your cultural library for recent-ish pop culture was about a millimeter deep, compared to now.
So, yes, 1985 is closer to 2015 than 1955 was to 1985 in some key ways. Some of that is because you can only repeal Jim Crow laws once. Some of that is because Netflix has Punky Brewster on demand. Some of that is because most people are neither gay nor trans.
Well, rights or no rights, they are still a quite small minority -- say 10% of the population for both. And that's the big number -- because the more relevant for a movie number, that of "trans people" + "gay people that you can tell from straight people" (e.g. with clear stylistic choices in clothes etc) is much much smaller.
So, unless the script calls for it, they'd only show one in a movie with like 5-10 people in the whole cast if they want to go out of their way to include the "token gay guy".
I believe they did not: teevee was broadcast live, and mostly not recorded. IIRC.
This is actually a pretty good point, indirectly. The rise of widespread internet culture and meme might have something to do with this feeling. Kids are brought up with international internet lingo and jokes that are ubiquitous and timeless. You don't need to know that joke X comes from old movie Y, you just know joke X and you know it's funny. It permeates your culture regardless of your age, and that creates connection between past and present generations.
As the quote goes: "Hamlet is just one famous saying after another"
I can watch 20 other sitcoms from 10 and 15 years before Seinfield (from MASH to Mork and Mindy to Taxi), that I wasn't even adult when they first run, and they are still funny, even when their styles and jokes have been copied....
I was born in 1980 and had played DooM when it first came out. These guys got me back into it. This seems like a bit of a pattern with high school and college aged kids nowadays -- being interested in some of the 80s subculture stuff.
[0] using the mod http://zandronum.com/ and the campaign http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?file=levels/doom2/Ports/me...
I was recently a chaperone for a teenager weekend event which included several concerts and public speakers. I brought my 3DS with me because I figured I'd get a lot of street passes (for those unfamiliar, a street pass means that if anyone else walks by you with a 3DS in their pocket, you'll share avatars with one another automatically, which can be used in minigames). I was extremely surprised that I didn't get a single street pass. It turns out that their generation is largely gaming on their phone and doesn't care about handheld consoles too much.
Music may be more timeless than other media. I don't think the quality of the music has changed as drastically as that of other technological changes. Videogames have more processing power. TV shows feature characters who dress differently and who show certain quirks of the era.
It could also be that, before the internet, music from earlier times simply wasn't that available. It wasn't played on the radio, and you had to work fairly hard to find an older album to buy.
These days, older music is just a click away, though I find that pre-CD music is still often hard to find.
In short, it's not that the society of previous time period was more different during these ranges, it's that our perception of that previous period through their surviving media was more or less relatable to our current experiences.
The "generation gap" was a function of market forces and media. Its gone now. The past is present.
> Let’s stop checklisting and complaining and start opening things up and bolting them together again.
Good luck with that. Electronics made in the 80's were a lot more friendly to open up and repurpose (to the individual part level) than what you buy today.
On the other, as a popular internet image says, you've got everything listed on a full-page Radio Shack - and more - in a package smaller than a walkman in your pocket nowadays, with the possibility to write any kind of software (or indeed attach any kind of accessory to) for it, which far exceeds anything anyone with an old radio and a soldering iron could ever do - and in a fraction of the time. And share that same thing instantly with a potential audience of tens of millions with the press of a button.
So maybe you can't open something up and bolt it together again - but you shouldn't marginalize what you can do instead either.
On Android, at least, to the extent that that's a problem, its a convenience-of-the-form-factor problem (with tablets even this isn't really a big problem, especially with keyboard cases), rather than a lack-of-support problem (iOS, out of the box, is somewhat more locked down, but even there I think there are some options.)
There are quite a lot of on-device programming environments, largely free-of-charge, in the Google Play Store.
Sure you can, it's just not staring you in the face from the second you turn it on.
And there's just so many more distractions these days. I'm not even old enough for the BASIC days, I grew up with a Mac Classic, but you had maybe 10 simple games, an office package, a draw program and that was it. Then there was HyperCard where I could create all those other things. As a kid I didn't think of it as "programming", I was just messing around creating things.
On a device today there's a million free apps to spend your time on. If you want to do programming you have to decide "I want to learn programming" and look up the tools for that.
On the off chance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y
1. Because of the internet, recording technologies, etc., we have a much more accurate view of the relatively recent past than one had in the 1980s.
2. From the 50s to the 80s there was a huge change in societal attitudes vs. authority, order, etc. Nothing as dramatic has happened since. Cynicism has changed in its specifics, been put aside occasionally, etc., but since the stock market crash of 1987 and Iran/Contra took some of the bloom off the Reagan rose, there hasn't been a huge societal consensus, so there in particular hasn't been a huge societal consensus that was later shattered.
3. Sexual mores had a much bigger shift from the 50s to the 80s than from the 80s to the present; the 80s are when the view was adopted that sex was permissible but dangerous, and that's been the general societal attitude ever since.
4. I agree that modern filmmaking techniques emerged in the 1970s. Hollywood then regressed to the more commercial action blockbusters, but eventually technology evolved to the point that the same or even greater quality of storytelling was possible on television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was like a series of 1970s auteur movies of 22 * 47 minute duration. The same is true of Babylon 5, except that the dialogue (usually stolid at best, Londo & G'kar excepted) and special effects were more in the George Lucas vein. TV may have progressed even further since.
5. The internet brought tremendous changes to day-to-day life, especially if you include the rest of computing (PCs, video games, mobile phones) as well. I don't have a good answer for why that alone doesn't make the 1980s feel more distant than they do.
6. People never know many details of era before their own. This was brought home to me when my stepdaugher, who is a Middle East expert (e.g. relevant Master's degree from Harvard), couldn't get a Trivial Pursuit question whose correct answer was Gamal Abdel Nasser.