n7axw wrote:Tenshinai wrote:As a sidenote, it might be interesting to look at how this same thing actually happened already in early 20th century, before WWI there was an explosive development in regards to making maximum use of telegraph, telephone, railroads, cars and radio.
Even if it was less personal than in recent decades, it´s quite amazing that it took until the 1990s for the mailorder market to again reach the levels of speed, access and reliability that existed in Europe and USA at least, in 1910.
Which is totally weird when you consider that delivery by air was nonexistant at the time.
The combination of the massive expansion of instant communication, lots of new and cheap cars, hypercheap fuel, a railroad net becoming quite extensive very quickly, a new generation of merchant ships (faster and cheaper), hoardes of workers available for cheap and lots of new technologies that just eeeveryone haaad to get...
Lots of companies in Europe set a standard of "1 week delivery to any railroad station or port in Europe", something that is hard to achive even today, without relying on air delivery.
It was a very interesting period of time.
Anyway, my not so important point was that change isn´t always positive, nor is development always linear, sometimes it goes up, other times it goes down.
I end to think more in terms of sociological change than technological change without intending to downplay the later. I regard the following as ironclad. Change is really the only constant. Societies are born and grow to maturity. They then decay and die as new societies are born in the midst of the ashes. They in turn undergo the same cycle.
As the war with the bugs begins in "In Death's Ground", Admiral Villiers in ruminating wonders, Does anyone recognize the end of a golden age when it happens?
Good question. I don't have the answer.
Don
Hi Don, Tenshinai. Don, I'd amend your statement a bit: change, taxes and death are the only constants in our lives
I really love history. Not the grandiose stuff of classical historiography - the battles, the treaty summits, the kings and empires, the barbarian invasions. No, what I really love is to study the day-to-day lives and conditions of people, the customs, the interactions.
One of the things I've come to realize is that we really only ever become aware of change in our lives when it happens on a grand scale - most of the time, we are hardly aware of all the innumerable ways in which our daily lives are affected by changing attitudes, new things, new relationships, etc. The reason for that is that those changes happen gradually and without drama.
Namelessfly began his/her(?) last post on this subject by saying that the examples I gave are simply daily events that were a normal part of people's lives. But that is very much the nature of most change happening to us or affecting our lives.
A month ago a new family moved in next door to me - two fathers and their twin girls. As is quite normal in our neighbourhood, we held a braai (I believe Americans call it a cook-out or a barbeque?) to welcome the newcomers into our community. And in the weeks since, I've noticed that the neighbourhood gossip hardly mentioned the unconventional nature of the new family. This is a perfect example of how gradually changing attitudes over the last several years, maybe even longer, have had a real, concrete impact on people's attitudes, worldview and daily lives. It wasn't a dramatic, all-of-a-sudden kind of thing, but something that kind of crept up on people.