This title of this post came to me one day while I was thinking about when I first started reading Christian books. To be honest, I hadn't realized that the first decade of the millennium was called the aughts until much more recently. In my mind, I kept calling it the 2000s, but I can see how that has more syllables and may be a mouthful. It's hard to believe that a few decades have passed since I first came to faith in Jesus Christ and subsequently, read almost everything I could get my hands on (I'm thankful that God provided some discernment in my early Christian years despite my voraciousness!). As a result, the content of books from the late 90s and early 00s is vastly different than content today. For nostalgia's sake, I sometimes read older novels or books to recapture memories before life became highly technological.
I recently saw a meme that shared how the millennial generation should be renamed the Spice Girl generation. Apparently, "Members of the Spice Girls generation are the only people in history to have both grown up with the internet and to retain childhood memories that predate it" (Caity Weaver). While I'm a tad bit older than the birth years provided, I can relate to having an analog life and a digital life. Although I first used a computer in the late 1980s at school, it was not a common household fixture until the mid-1990s, and even then, that was a privilege for families who could afford it. I remember my parents scrimping and saving in order to furnish me with a desktop computer, which I've never had the heart to throw away and which still technically works. The one thing we did get rid of is something that I miss to this day—a blue (now considered vintage) typewriter that I wrote all of my stories on in elementary school. When I progressed to an electric typewriter a little later on, it felt like such a time-saver! Being in the first graduating class that allowed students to write
provincial exams on the computer instead of pen and paper seems like it was a great leap at the time. Now I think of how people can do so many things with just a smartphone, and it truly is mind-boggling at times.
When reading books from the aughts or earlier, these are a few of the differences from contemporary or non-fiction books written today that I have noticed:
- I remember what it was like to not have instantaneous contact with people. People could only be reached by landline, and later, pagers (though I don't recall knowing anyone who had one), and much later, cell phones. Nowadays, people can be reached anywhere and anytime, which should eliminate miscommunication themes in books. In non-Christian books, screen time was more limited to the issue of televisions. If only they could see us now.
- Delivery existed for pizza, but few other culinary options. When I read about people getting all sorts of deliveries now, it's pretty amazing how widespread that is. I can recall books where a plot device would be having to go to a physical location for something. More recent books I've read have included the notion of getting deliveries at midnight, getting something shipped in the same day or the day after, or being on a device and ordering something that you hadn't realized was possible (like convenience store items!).
- The availability of information at our fingertips is astounding. A lot of older books would talk about the steps involved in researching something, a task not easily embarked on. Going to libraries or referencing encyclopedias doesn't seem like that long ago; now with voice assistants, people don't even have to move their hands!
- The role of social media is an obvious change, but it makes me think of the impact on relationships as well. Social circles were more limited when there was no online reach. Who you knew was who you knew in your community, school, work, church, etc. At the same time, while the quantity of relationships has increased, more attention is now being paid to loneliness. I'm sure a lot of studies have been conducted on the connection between social media and the quality of relationships now, but it was certainly a different era where a social life was manifest in-person (or maybe through long-distance calls and letter writing). Related to these is mental health, where it seems like this new digital world would have been one less stressor in people's lives.
- The nature of work and the types of job functions has expanded considerably. Back then, a lot of non-fiction books documented well-known professional roles, such as teachers, nurses, tradespeople, etc. With a lot of new information age-based work now, it's a bit more difficult to explain these positions, along with the opportunities and challenges that have come from practices such as working from home, remote work for a multi-national company, or side gigs. In novels, there's been a shift toward people having more flexible work so that there is time for a story to develop đŸ˜„
- The prevalence of travel and transportation options. I still remember booking trips in college through a travel agent (and these weren't for packages or luxurious travel either—just plain basic airfare). Now that it's much more common to book travel tickets on our devices, it feels like travel is much more accessible, though maybe not less-costly. It seems like it's no longer a big deal for a character in a book to go places, whereas in older books, there was a little bit more work involved in having to procure train or bus tickets, for example. With non-fiction books, I remember that travel was usually discussed in the context of people travelling for work such as salespeople, or maybe the one family trip that had been planned for ages.
Comments
Post a Comment