Much of contemporary American life has changed dramatically, but it’s done so without much awareness of just how drastic some of the changes have been, or how recent they are.

When I was a kid, there were no cell phones. Houses had land lines, and the old rotary dial phones. You had to dial zero for the operator, a real human, to make a long distance call, and they were quite expensive. Those phones were large, and had inside them a real kind of bell, so the phones
actually rang. My smart phone “rings,” we call it but it’s more like a musical chirp.

There was no internet. That means no email, no browsing on the internet, no games. When I grew up my friends and I played cards—canasta, hearts, pinochle, and we played chess on an actual board, not oinline. We played Risk and Monopoly. In college nobody had computers and we played
penny-ante poker and drank beer.

Libraries did not have an online catalogue. They had card catalogues on real cards about 3 x 5 inches, arranged alphabetically. My college library had a card catalogue that must have had hundreds of thousands of cards. Research was vastly more difficult. You found cards of likely useful books, went to the place on the shelf and checked out the book. Looking for sources in journals and magazines was a chore. The internet has cut the time that takes by probably 95%.

There’s another big change. Once in grad school I had a big seminar paper, over a hundred pages. I typed it all on a small electric typewriter, one that had a carbon ribbon and corrected mistakes with a white-out fluid. I needed to rewrite the paper, so I spread the hundred pages around the
perimeter of my office, got a pair of scissors and a tube of glue, and then spent a full day literally cutting and pasting, and then had to retype it. Word processing on computers would have cut that work by probably more than 95% and been more accurate. Easy to use word processing came along shortly after that.

I recall reading headlines about cell phones thinking they sounded cool, but somebody was putting a camera in them. I thought at the time that it was a remarkably stupid idea, and now I’m addicted to selfies.

When I was a kid, we had three broadcast television stations we could watch, because cable TV hadn’t made it to our city yet. Yet another change is what kids do. I read three or four books a week then, but we kids got
home from school, played in the street, went in for supper and then came back out and played in the street until the streetlights came on. We’d play kick the can and stickball and other games I can’t remember. On Saturdays sometimes I’d head for a city park to go fishing and be gone for hour after
hour, and nobody worried. I walked many blocks to get to school when I was in kindergarten, as did everybody else. There were child predators and accidents then as there are now, but people were less preoccupied with the bad possibilities.

I do not know when that changed, but it has. In my Florida neighborhood, there are plenty of kids of all ages, but I almost never seen any of them.

That hasn’t beenhat long ago, but in some ways, it seems like a different planet.

I grew up without a microwave. To make popcorn, you heated oil in a pot, added the popcorn, put the lid on and listened to the corn popping. It’s a lot easier to toss a bag into the microwave. I used to wear a watch, but since I started using a cell phone, it has the exact time and doesn’t need winding. I used to cruise bookstores, but most of them have gone extinct and Amazon has literally hundreds of times more books and the prices are better.

Things have changed. And most of them are for the better. Don’t listen to anybody who chatters
about the good old days.

Deep knowledge, every day.
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