@Ruth Belena posted a thread about "changing attitudes to the internet" and it got me thinking. The internet has developed into what it is today, mostly thanks to the Generation X'ers and the Millennials. We have non-social social media, the advent of the under 140 character conversions. We have cyber-bullying, and congressmen posting pictures of their unmentionables. We have a society where anyone who wants their 15 minutes of fame, can post a video of themselves online. This generation seems to use the internet for such trivial things. Or scary ones - want to learn how to build a bomb, want to obtain illegal merchandise, want girlie pictures? The internet is histories biggest and mightiest collection of information. It is truly amazing. You can find out anything you want in milliseconds. Can you imagine how much easier school would have been, had we had this technology. Remember building spaceships out of cardboard boxes - imagine if we could have research "spaceships" on the internet. In high school, when you were asked "What do you want to be when you grow up?", a simple google search of one of your interests would have given you 100s of career opportunities. When your first child had a temperature, you could have gone online to figure out what to do, and if you needed to take him to the doctor. My husband and I have talked about how wonderful the internet would have been when we were kids and teenagers - the things we could have discovered and learned - the adventures we could have had. Want to learn a new arts or crafts, go to youtube. My husband was a gear head - when he was trying to fix a new car, just go online and find out everything there is to know about the car. So, do you think that the internet would be what it is today if we, the Baby Boomers had had control over it in it's infancy? How do you think the internet would be different today if it was widespread back in the '50s-'70s?
I don't think things were any different back then. When VHS was first introduced the market was flooded with "video nasties" and people started making "sex tapes". Before that home movies were made, not just for family viewing. Photos were used for blackmail and as evidence in divorce cases. I think each generation exploits whatever technology is available at the time. We have access to instant information now via the Internet, but that information was always available in some form if you knew where to look or had access to books, journals, encyclopedia and newspapers.
We did thats why it exists today... baby boomers were the ones that helped create the internet here is an interesting story in Reuters that talks about the contributions that the baby boomers made towards today's internet experience. I think the question you are asking is if we had the present level of information during our era what could we have done with it? that's hard to say for sure, I am not so certain if we would have been all about the selfies. I think many of the things that came about in the early years of the boomers were out of necessity, we were in war times and we needed to be on top. After that it was all about corporations and making stuff, times had changed and we needed to be able to do things like chores faster so more time could be spent on production in factories. hence, washers, dryers and refrigerators. last part was television, it did not take long before the evils and the values of the TV were realized. had we had that stuff then that the kids have today i would imagine that we would be sitting and waiting for the next best thing. I have a theory that all that time we spent in the 90's waiting for things to load helped spurn some improvements, if things are to perfect there is no reason to try and change it.