The Little Differences
The past is a foreign country you can never visit
Vincent
I know, baby, you'd dig it the most.. But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?
Jules
What?Vincent
It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there they got here, but, it's just, just, there it's a little different.
I was thinking about the unidirectional time travel we all have to endure. What’s it like living in the future? Well, here you are—it feels like this, pretty much. The trick is remembering what it was like to live in the past. You are not immune to shifting baselines syndrome, and your baselines change over the course of your own life. What you imagine to be normal was probably once a novelty, and it will someday seem to be a curiosity again. As Margaret Atwood wrote: “Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”
If you spend time doing research on other societies, you begin to realize how difficult it is to translate an entire way of being. It gets easier as you grow older, or as you acquire more experience of life and people, which are not quite the same thing. But one also becomes uncomfortably aware that the society in which one grew up is not the society in which one lives now, and it will not be the one in which the youth of today will live at your age.
Being in a teaching profession, however slightly, will uncharitably remind you of this, with none of the comforts or condolences of multigenerational familial ties to soften the blow. Not only does one have to either learn entire new slangs every few years or resign oneself to complete mystification, one has to endure the drudgery of translating the remote and exotic world of, say, America in 2001 to students for whom that is literally not part of their lived experience. Just imagine what you believe is “normal” if you came of political age during the Trump administration—and then try to convey why a months-long Discourse was occasioned by Dan Quayle taking a swipe at Murphy Brown. (Please remember that the first thing you’ll have to explain is the premise of the show and Murphy’s job as a network television correspondent.)
As Tarantino argued in Pulp Fiction, the differences between cultures can be measured in little discrepancies between experience and expectation. The same holds for traveling back and forth along the track of one’s own experience, or the experience of one’s own society. And these sorts of changes are the very stuff of political debates and historical experience, which make them frustratingly difficult to convey to people who have only experienced one of the societies—the present. Sometimes the differences are just annoying or trivial, but sometimes they complicate trying to understand the real substance of debates and disputes in the past.
Part of this can be established grossly by looking at macro statistics.
There used to be fewer restaurants, and my distinct impression is that there used to be fewer chain restaurants. There was a whole ecosystem of local, non-chain fast and casual dining places that remains but which used to be the default. (Imagine McDonald’s as the aspirational fast-food place.)
These days, folks complain about having bullshit jobs. (The thesis is wrong but whatever—it’s a nifty label.) In one sense, it’s true: a lot more folks used to have jobs that you could describe easily, like “I work in a factory” or “I work on a farm”. Something like half to two thirds more folks used to work in manufacturing than do today as a percent of the population, while
But other details are more evocative. I was considering the little things that were once ubiquitous and have now all but vanished, whose importance in themselves may be slight but which, taken together, add up to something of a record of the operation of the half-life of social relations:
Everyone used to have a paper address book that would contain the physical mailing addresses and telephone numbers of friends, relatives, and contacts.
You also used to have (at least one) telephone book with commercial, governmental, and residential contact information for an entire city at a time. It was always a shock to go to another city—say, Terre Haute or Chicago—and see how much thicker or thinner their phone book was. I used to use the phone book daily or almost daily; I literally can’t recall the last time I saw one.
Paper was a much bigger deal. Starting in or before elementary school, your life was defined by carting around paper, all the time. You had a “permanent record” which was a lot of paper put carefully into a manila folder and passed from school to school. If you wanted to go on a field trip, you needed a paper permission slip signed in ink by a parent. When I got to university in the early 2000s, it was a big deal that now much more of my life would be recorded electronically—and I was still doing a vast amount of work on paper well into graduate school a decade later. (A typical standup TV spot on the local news would involve just waiting for Tax Day and filming people filing their paper taxes before midnight on April 15.) The physicality of these records made everything seem official and important, and also very much rewarded people who were competent at managing file folders to keep their papers from getting mangled. These days, of course, nothing’s on paper but the state and corporations know vastly more about you.
There didn’t used to be screens, or even televisions, everywhere. Basically sometime around 2015 the costs of flatscreens became cheap enough that even local restaurants ditched their menu boards (frequently sponsored by drink companies) and instead programmed their menus into screens. Right until that point, having everything on screen instead of chalkboard or letterboard was the sort of thing that signified wealth or science fiction.
Relatedly and trivially: there used to be a lot more paperclips and staplers. Well into my teaching career, students and faculty would face friction over whether a paper that wasn’t stapled had actually been turned in. These days, I don’t even allow paper copies to be turned in — it’s all going into the (timestamped, surveilled, databased) system.
I guess what I’m describing is that we all actually live in the paperless office now.
The news cycle was incredibly slow. How slow? Newspapers set the pace. A story would emerge in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, get picked up and reported further by the Chicago Tribune or the Baltimore Sun, and then filter up to the network news shows a day or two later—and be the subject of discussion that weekend on the talk shows and get full writeups in the three major newsweeklies the following week. You could basically be as informed as more or less anyone (that is, not very) below the level of Fortune 500 CEO with a subscription to Time.
Information was incredibly scarce. Getting informed about trends and fashions, therefore, required a lot more effort. It was a big deal when a Starbucks would come to a second or third-tier town because now you could purchase the New York Times. These days, unless I’m mistaken, coffee shops don’t even carry newspapers—why would they? Maybe a better example: People used to buy magazines so they could find advertisements. Imagine opting in to more advertising.
University bulletin boards a) used to exist and b) used to be full of adverts for people who would type your papers for you. And, yes, literally just type: you’d hand them a yellow legal pad full of handwriting and they would turn into a document for you. I genuinely wonder what happened to those folks.
Related: copyright infringement…is not exactly unknown these days, but it pretty much used to be the business model for the large copy shops that would print course readers for classes. The professor would send over a list of articles and chapters (the articles and chapters themselves? I’m unclear) and then the copy shops would make and sell hundreds of copies of the readers. Publishers would see nothing. I genuinely wonder whether lawsuits or library databases drove this system to death first.
Cars would just break down. A car with 100,000 miles on it was nearing death. If you had a ten-year-old car, everyone would assume that you were an eccentric or a pauper.
Computers used to be for the very very very nerdy or the very very very professional. It used to be a radical fashion statement (I’m not that kind of computer user!) to do something really daring, like have floppy discs in many different colors. Relatedly: employees and college students used to end up with tons of floppy discs, sometimes labeled and more often not. And there was no search function.
“Secretary” and “homemaker” were terms you’d hear all the time.
A lot more stuff used to be homemade. Like, a lot more. Not for the ‘gram, either. People would go to the fabric store (a phrase I have not heard in years), buy a pattern (ditto), and make their own clothes. A few folks still do, some from preference and some from necessity, but I mean that people used to own sewing machines like they own microwaves now. Schools taught sewing as a critical life skill!
The Pulp Fiction scene I quoted above? The entire point was that marijuana was mostly legal in Amsterdam, unlike the USA. Welp.
The list goes on but I’m already running the risk of sounding like a Boomer Facebook post. The point is that I could tell (fairly accurately) stories about how technological change and globalization brought most of these changes about—and reinforced each other—but the changes are so complete that unless you lived through them you can’t understand that high schools didn’t have typing classes because everyone used a computer but because those 18-year-olds were going to get typing jobs in a few months, or that it was the opening of trade barriers coupled with improvements in textiles manufacturing that produced plummeting clothing prices and made making your own clothing something that only a very crafty or very poor person would do.
If you don’t grasp this sort of thing, you can kind of understand debates in the past but you won’t fully understand what the past was all about or what the past can shed light on in your life now. Just to take manufacturing politics and trade, for instance: in the 1980s, it was about saving jobs; in the 1990s, it was about retraining workers; in the 2000s, it was about really really retraining workers; and now, all of a sudden, we have more manufacturing jobs than workers. This may be one reason why it’s actually harder to teach trade politics (in my experience): talking about losing manufacturing jobs is like talking about losing farm jobs. Why, students wonder, would anyone even want those jobs? (Few students, to be sure, are as bold as the one who referred to manufacturing workers as “losers” and wondered why they didn’t just do better in school and become surgeons.)
Such complete changes make it hard to understand the pace of change because we’re running out of fixed points to anchor our comparisons. The world still feels, more or less, like it did a few decades ago, albeit with less boredom and more phone fixation (and way less cigarette smoke). And, tomorrow, it will feel more or less the same. Over the next generation, however, the changes we assimilate are apt to be less economic and more ecological and climatic. Conveying a world in which we didn’t think about the environment all the time will be a bit of a challenge for the me of 2040.
The ubiquity of paper takes me back. But I think that there was an academy without screens is the dominant memory for me. At my first academic teaching post, in 1982, our offices had a desk, a phone, and, if you wanted, a typewriter. The university had a computer, but it was in another building. And it is hard for me to explain how, for me, the desktop computer + internet has changed the faculty office, not in terms of less paper or more access to information or much much faster communication, but to where our attention is directed, to the student or colleague who has dropped by (this happens every few weeks or so now, rather than routine) who is now competing with the device in a way that in days of yore they were not competing with something we were reading, or writing in a notepad.
When you start to think about the vastness of used-to-be-ordinary things that no one generally bothered to write down because they were ordinary, you begin to see why historians are sometimes so uncertain (or prone to argument) about so many fundamentals of everyday life. Think about your example of essays submitted as typewritten papers. There are so many things that go along with that--the question of whether an unstapled paper could be saved only scratches the surface. Was it ok if there were liquid paper-corrections? How many of those were too many? (And of course, for the unartful who went too quickly after applying it or who clumsily got it on the rest of the paper, a retype almost certain awaited.) What process did you use to write the whole thing? Type the first draft, despite the errors? Turning in physical copies, often unsurveilled or to a box somewhere, opened up a whole raft of lies and excuses--the paper was damaged, the paper was lost, the paper was destroyed; the paper was shoved under the door, honest! And you couldn't just say "well, print another copy"--it wasn't routine to photocopy a paper before submission (that could get expensive if it was a longer paper--in grad school I was responsible for providing copies of my first-year seminar paper to the entire department faculty which would have been $75 to photocopy or some then-absurd amount, so instead I had to sit in the teeny-tiny windowless carbon-copy room and personally run off 35 copies while my head was reeling from the ink. And so on--a vast array of material practices that interlocked cultural practices that interlocked ways of thinking (drafting was just vastly different before cut-and-paste on a word processor), and all of it will be exceptionally hard to describe in only a few more decades, because a lot of the materially important details will never have been described in an enduring way.