A meme

[firecat]

'If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them?'

This is a strange meme. I know plenty of people who were alive during the 1950s. If they are any indication, the most difficult thing to explain is how to use a modern cell phone or smart phone to make a phone call while not accidentally doing anything else with it.

(I recently got my dad what was advertised as a basic, unsmart cell phone. Every time I picked it up, I managed to trigger the voice recognition function.)

I think the other most difficult thing to explain would be certain kinds of humor that have come about since the 50s. I'm not sure how to explain which kinds, though.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

My grandfather (passed away in 2005) was born in 1916 and he loved his mobile phone! He thought texting was awesome. And he liked to play card games online with people in other countries, and worked as a pharmacist (including using online medical references) until 6 months before he died. I can't think of much that would be hard to explain to him! Or my parents, born in the 1940s, who carry their Samsung Android tablet everywhere so they can look things up and show everyone their photos.

I guess the hardest thing to explain for me would be that we rarely worry about worldwide nuclear destruction anymore, just terrorist activity. I find that hard to process myself sometimes!

[firecat]

My dad loves his computers and his iPad; it's just the cell phone he can't figure out/doesn't remember to charge/forgets to carry with him/etc.

[amadi]

This is my mom too. She really dislikes the phone, until she needs to use it then it's great. I don't try to understand any more.

[sasha_feather]

My friends and I have explained "That's what she said" jokes to a few folks older than us.

[hobbitbabe]

This might be super naive and self-serving. And because I wasn't around in the 1950s and I am a product of the current era, I could easily be shown to be wrong sometime in the future.

But I sort of feel like a huge shift in acceptance and appreciation of diversity has started since then. A person who had privilege in the 1950s (like a straight white able-bodied middle-class married man) is going to have the usual time-traveller culture-shock on arrival, but it seems to me as if he'd be caught by surprise over and over by things like how we respect children's emotions, how we navigate intimate partnerships of equals, and so on. And presumably a person from the 1950s who wasn't all those things might find our cultures equally surprising although possibly more palatable.

[firecat]

I think that would certainly be true of some time travelers from the 1950s.

[onyxlynx]

As someone who was a child in the relevant period, I would have to say "It depends on when our time traveler left the '50s."

Some parts of the '50s would find current music rather alien and current movies on the pornographic side. And the number of professional sports teams is huge. But why aren't we all writing Beat poetry?

[firecat]

D'ya think some of them would also be surprised at the relative rarity of cigar smoking?

[onyxlynx]

They would be surprised by the relative rarity of smoking, period; I remember when people smoked everywhere (and thank God that is no longer true). I have a still-vivid picture of a room with layers of smoke (both parents puffed until the early '60s).

[firecat]

My folks both smoked until the mid-70s, so yeah.

And I think travelers from the '50s might be pretty weirded out by some of the things we call martinis these days.

[necturus]

I am from the 1950s. That's when I was born.

I think what the meme originator probably meant to ask is "if someone who died in the 1950s came back to life today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to him or her?"

As it happens, I've been watching a lot of 1950s-vintage railroad promotional videos on YouTube lately. They all reflect the boundless optimism of the period; America had just won World War II and was in the middle of the greatest economic boom in its history. Jobs were plentiful, and millions ordinary industrial workers could buy houses in the suburbs and raise families on one paycheck.

I think the question would be: how did the American dream die?