Reflections and General Nonesense

There was a silly thing I saw recently that made me think it could be amusing to reflect on some things that have worked out strangely over time.

The spur was a visual joke showing a picture of an eighties brick phone and a more conventional sized phone from 5 or so years ago saying 'I remember when phones were that big', then another showing a phone from 5 years ago and a smartphone from today saying 'I remember when phones were that small. The joke amused me partly because it showed how what most thought would be an eternal quest for the smallest mobile has become anything but and I started thinking what else has gone that way.

Part of the amusement I have witnessed has been due to period revivals. The seventies I saw mocked relentlessly in my early teens for the ridiculous platforms and flares made a comeback and soon all the sheeple who had been mocking these fashions were wearing them. Currently in the UK there has been an eighties revival, the period known at the time as the decade style forgot has been remembered, though without seeming to see the joke. This was a time when men could proudly wear a fluorescent pink sock and be considered masculine, as long as the other one was a different fluorescent colour, matching was not good. There were many who took the fashions seriously in the eighties but most of us just saw it as an opportunity to dress like clowns and laugh at each other.
There is something incredibly strange seeing people trying to capture the effect of a period I remember well in a serious manner when the fashions were commonly accepted as a joke.

Second hand clothing was the realm of those too poor to buy new. Jumble sales were so etched in my mind for the amount of bullying the purchases would bring my way I haven't been to one as an adult. I used charity shops to get smart clothes when broke and needing a respectable job and kitted myself out nicely for £20 top to toe with spares.
I went into a charity shop a couple of years ago and got the shock of my life. The term retro has become very big and with it the price of pre-owned clothing, to such an extent I could buy new clothes cheaper. Not quite sure how that happened but you certainly wouldn't be bullied for wearing the jumble sale gear anymore, in fact you may get more grief if your clothes are too new, I don't know totally out of touch really.

When I went to school there was a computer class, I never took it because I was reliably informed it was basically secretarial training. The machines had slots for the genuinely floppy disks and the rigid 3.5 inch floppy carrying a whopping 1.33Mb of data at a time. Home computer needs more ROM no problem just switch the C60 tape to a C120 instead, instant doubling of ROM if the computer had the RAM to cope with such vast data. Storage of computer data was serious business, and even Windows 95 came on floppy disks, 35 of them. Now USB flash drives that will hold gigabytes of data, a term people in the eighties would never have known let alone considered using, are made in novelty shapes and given away as trinkets.
Now we consider a nursery class without at least one computer to be neglecting our children's education. Your washing machine will have a higher spec computer than the best home PC from thirty years ago. Data storage on something we hold in our hands is old hat anywhere but in cameras and antique music players, that's what the cloud is for. I wonder how long it will be before a company starts selling portable hard drives in the shape of a 3.5 inch floppy disk for the retro image.

I have watched the young rebels become rose tinted has-beens talking of how wonderful things were when they were younger and how much respect they had to show. No mention of how little they did of course. The truth is I would say there is less crime on the streets now, young people are barely out of the house away from the TV and computer games. With less people out and about there is more fear because people feel isolated walking around, but in truth they aren't at any greater risk.

Smoking has become something only the working or non-working classes do. While it used to be a luxury now it's become a stigma and label to show that you are spending money you almost certainly don't have to spare. Growing up you felt ostracised if you didn't smoke now this has swung full circle.

Cars were a luxury for many as I grew up. The idea of a two car family was almost seen as showing off even if it was essential. Cycling was the poor man's transport and often the more realistic alternative to the second car.
Now owning a car is seen as a virtual human right and cheap runabouts can be picked up for less than a week’s minimum wage. By contrast you can spend thousands on a bicycle and gear enabling you to look like a technicolor yawn as you glide past the traffic jams. The car has become the norm to such an extent the cyclist is to be envied as he passes and the car driver knows they will not catch them back up. Two, three and often four car families are common as parents give their children a vehicle to get themselves to school or out of their way in general.

The school run. There were plenty of parents taking their children to school in cars when I was growing up, especially when they were in secondary education, now called high school, when schools could be many miles away but this seems to have become so much the norm now that insurance companies have recognised it as one of the areas where accidents are most common. The distance that many are prepared to walk to school has dropped to a level I would never have believed when younger, with more people willing to sit in cars for a half hour round trip battling in traffic than allow their offspring to walk 20 minutes to school. Where once the car was deemed the fast and efficient method it is now considered so essential that sense has evaporated.

Gambling, once the reserve of the bookmakers clientele is now in so many homes I am almost deemed foolhardy for not buying a weekly glut of lottery tickets. What was once a mugs game is now expected to such an extent people will ask what you would do with a lottery win as if no-one would not be buying tickets.

There was an expression that to see the UK in 10 years look at the US today. We got our own back to some extent by sending them brit pop, but it seems to have become an expensive and dangerous competition of who can have more obesity, diabetes, heart disease and ignorance than the worst stereotypical American you could possibly imagine. Homer Simpson seems to have been viewed less a comedy character, more a role model.
We have bought into a lot of the convenience ideas and there was certainly a demand, but for some reason too few seem to have observed what happened to the US when this lifestyle became the norm. Watching US TV has given many the impression junk food and inactivity will make them look like Cameron Diaz rather than Rosanne Barr despite all evidence point to the contrary.

Terrorism. When I was young the fear was from a group of very professional terrorists known as the Irish Republican Army IRA for short, funded legally and publically in the US these guys weren't into suicide bombings, they made sure they were well out of the way so they lived to do it again. For some reason we are supposed to be more in fear now than we were then, despite the current rather amateur versions having been easily stopped at Glasgow airport by a handy Scotsman who decided a man on fire needed to be knocked out rather than feared, not heard from them since.
I do understand that a lot of the fear is due to the undeniably horrific tragedy that was 9/11 or 11/9 in the UK an event that no single terrorist cell has yet taken responsibility for. However I find it bizarre that we in the UK fear groups who haven't harmed us or looked likely to on our soil in years, while in my youth there were attacks a few times a year.

Communication has become massive in my lifetime and made us ironically far more isolated by doing so. I was not a popular kid at school and remember the excitement of us getting a phone line to be able to contact the few friends I did have, usually to organise going to meet them in person. The idea of being able to meet up with people via computers of mobile devices that lived anywhere in the world made us all think the world would shrink and we would become more open minded and universally tolerant as you would expect from someone well-travelled.
Truth is that people have found themselves groups of likeminded from all over and are doing online battle on a daily basis with anyone whose views oppose theirs. The fact they are able to find others in the world with the same view has made them more likely to cling to these rather than listen to anyone else as they would have to if the arguments were more localised. It has also made people bolder about what they will say than they would elsewhere too. Face to face it is unusual to be referred in many of the ways that are common online. Anonymity has made people behave in ways they wouldn't dare to in the real world.
I will often deliberately play devil's advocate in a debate to make people think or take both sides in to confuse people and spur them to consider their viewpoint seriously. The internet forums have generated a new form of this with far less thought known as the troll, far from wanting people to think they just want people angry and will portray a version of a character so ridiculous only the most ignorant will believe it, unfortunately there are plenty of them around. So you get pseudo-muslim extremists who have no idea about the muslim faith but will provoke anger in others who are afraid of the genuine extremists the Daily Mail and other irresponsible news media tell us are around every corner. Christian extremists declaring God will avenge us all for our heretic belief in evolution, anti-theists declaring religion as the source for all evil and preaching theirs is the only true path. This in itself wouldn't be an issue if these muppets weren't overshadowing the billions of genuine decent people from the groups they are impersonating for fun.
I have my own way of dealing with a lot of these things and have been told that I must be gay among other things. In these instances I simply tell them how right they were and ask if they were hoping to get some action. Usual response is a string of profanity and they disappear realising not everyone is fooled by such surface nonsense. Taken seriously these guys are dangerous, but treated as a joke they can be fun to play with.

Back to cars again. I remember the main things anyone cared about when I was younger was how a car went, and would it get you home again. MPH as a priority has shifted to MPG for many. Carbon was, and still is in fairness, an element on the periodic table, no-one cared how much of it came out of the back of the car as long as it went well. Electric windows were flash, power steering amazing and ABS something not to trust.
Now a car without air conditioning is considered too basic, it should connect to your music player stop you dying if you hit a truck at 70mph and travel several hundred miles on a tank of fuel while entertaining the passengers with the latest film and directing the driver home via a few railway lines.

Music has always been the arena for rebellion. Every generation wants music their parents don't approve of, which has become a bit strange now in many ways purely by the way it still manages to succeed.
How exactly people who grew up with punk rockers in see-through trousers, metal heads wearing chains and hurling abuse or sexual invitation down the microphone manage to pretend they have moral high ground I don't know but they do it.
Music itself hasn't really changed that much, the rhythms are similar, the acts are coming off a production line and most of the songs are covering things that have been covered before. We have protested injustice, declared love, danced provocatively wearing as little as legal for generations, it's not new anymore, but somehow people are still being shocked into protest.

The recent passing of the date Back to the Future went forward to has shown how priorities are rarely what you expect them to be. We have no hoverboards, I couldn't skateboard so didn't care, our TVs have grown but we tend to watch one channel at a time and the world is all about mobile tech now.
30 years ago when the film was released the idea of an internet was something only the biggest geeks would care about, and having a device that enabled talking to each other on the move would surely be far more impressive than one needing us to type our comments.
But the minutes on a mobile phone tariff are almost irrelevant for many, the unlimited text messages and web browsing is what we care about as well as how trendy the phone itself is, even if we have no idea how to use it. Smart phones for dumb people are the big hit the hoverboard was expected to be.

More than anything I find the way we get things so incredibly wrong amusing and wonder what we are totally misreading now. My music player is becoming out of date as more people use online radio stations instead, geeks are now cool as long as they buy the right second hand clothes but with more people going geek they aren't really the cool exception anymore, revival has been the fashion so long I wonder what happens when we catch up with the initial revival.
The future is a mystery but one thing we can guarantee is some of the things that will define it are those we sit looking at thinking will never catch on.