Why do pre-1990s times seem so different from now?

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Is it just because of the quality of film in the past or was the world in some way physically or metaphysically different? To me, any time before about 1990 or 1995 seems like not quite the same world as today. There's just something kind of different about the past, it seems like almost the same world as today but not quite. Do you think there was some kind of sweeping metaphysical change back in the 80s or 90s or do you think it has solely to do with technology and social changes?

Also I was born in 1990, so any time before I was born or before I can remember seems to me 'unreal' for that reason. But I even hear people who lived back in the 70s, 80s, say it was very different from today. I'm almost skeptical it was even the same world or universe.

Obviously your date of birth is a major factor. Another crucial factor is that the 1990s started just after the Berlin Wall fell, so it was the start of the Post-Cold War era. The 1980s and 1970s occurred in the midst of the Cold War. While there's some fear (probably sensationalized) over nuclear terrorism, the fact remains that nuclear war isn't a very real possibility now, whereas many people thought that the next day could be the start of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War.

Textiles is chemistry, democracy evolves, we live in industries where people have ideas?? Hope that helps.

Master_Pedant has some good points, but you could be onto something yourself with that whole "quality of film and technology" hypothesis. DVDs were developed around 1995, right around the same time as you notice a shift. Remember that up until then (and even for a few years afterward), the dominant technology for video playback was VHS-- aesthetically, it's a drastically different format from the digital video we use these days. The whole concept of media existing as digital information independent of some sort of physical substrate was only just in its infancy at that stage. And that was also back in the day where you had to sit through about 30 seconds of your modem making the most godawful screeching noises just to hook up to the Internet. There was no YouTube, there was no Wikipedia, and there were none of these big social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Which brings me to another point. If you notice a big difference, it may also have something to do with the level of connectivity and communication. The 90s wasn't just the post Cold War era-- it was the beginning of an unprecedented expansion of global commerce, communications apparatuses and media outlets. CNN existed all throughout the 1980s, but it wasn't until 1996 that Fox News and MSNBC gave it competition in the 24-hour news industry. These days information constantly bombards and overwhelms us. But back then-- especially before September 11th, when the 24-hour news cycle got its first real test as the new journalistic paradigm-- we were only beginning to become acquainted with the notion of realtime news. Realtime news makes a big difference in how people perceive the world around them.

never has humankind leapt forward as fast as we are now.

the first true webpage was started in the 1990'ies (before that there was no real www and everything was largely segmented, meaning you could not just put in a web address to anywhere only specific adresses inside your segment was readily available in the format we know today)

it has impacted every facet to the point where there is so much new in relation to old that we have never experienced it before.

I was in preschool in 1990, but I have some early childhood memories of life in the late 1980s. Here are some changes that took place in the 1990s:

• Technology
  
  • Cordless phones
  • Growing ubiquity of cell phones
  • The GUI-based personal computer (Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh)
  • Mass popularization of the Internet
  • Growth of cable and satellite television
  • Advances in DNA sequencing and genome mapping
• Politics and economics
  
  • Fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
  • Period of extended economic expansion
  • U.S. hegemony
  • Growth of Chinese economy
  • Influx of H1B information-technology workers and the beginning of outsourcing

So we have themes of technological and scientific progress along with globalization.

The end of the cold war ( as MP pointed out) and more important: the rise of the internet and digital technology. The former happened at the end of the eighties, the latter kicked in around the start of the nineties.

The OP mentioned movies. Movies are so spectacular ( I wouldnt say they were actually better in actual content) nowadays because of digital technology.

CD's for music appeared in the eighites, but this total digializatio of our lifestyle with everyone having a home computer - internet- cell phones- kicked in earnest in the early nineties. And has been intensifying every since.

That is a major change in the everyday lives of most people and the start of the nineties was the approximate temporal boundry line.

I disagree with MP about the nuke threat.

The odds that a city will be nuked by accident or in anger is slightly greater now than during the cold war... not less likely. But the consequesnses would be less.

Terrorists, rogue states, and even respectable states, using ONE little nuke on any given day today is much greater than the odds that the USA and the USSR were going to nuke each other at a given moment between 1947 and 1989. But if the US and Soviets had done that then both nations wouldve been exterminated fifteen tiemes over. Today A nuke might go off- but only a mere one or two hundred thousand people ( you know just another hiroshima) would die instead of the dead being numbered in the hundreds of millions or billions. Greater chance of a nuclear cherry bomb going off today as opposed to lesser odds of all out species suicide if a the cold war had gone hot and nuclear.

So does that makes us better off, or worse off than during the cold war?
Its hard to say.

To me, it's the world before the 1960s that seems unreal. But then, I was born in 1960. I suspect that's the main thing going on here.

The 1990s were really much more like the 1980s than they are like today. The big growth of digital technology happened in the 1980s, with the spread of the personal computer after IBM released the PC in 1981. Cell phones and the internet didn't become commonly used until 1995 or so. And 9/11, in 2001, really changed everyone's outlook.

I agree with naturalplastic: the chances of some kind of a nuclear war are much higher now than during the cold war. More people have nukes, and international tensions have become much more complex. On the plus side, a nuclear war now would probably destroy only a few cities, rather than scores of cities throughout entire continents.

My grandfather was born a year after the Wright Brothers flew, saw WWI, the rise of radio, WWII, the rise of television, vietnam, the era of cable tv, the space shuttle, the hubble telescope and the rise of the pc. And all of the fashion, music, politics, and bs in between.

As you see more decades roll by, you are better able to place them in context. What appears to be significant differences due to technology, fashion and events become less significant. The same people are walking around.

A lot of it is just the before you were born factor. TV and movies are probably the best perspective indicators. I remember watching reruns of the old classics like Lassie and Leave it to Beaver and thinking how it all seemed so foreign (this was in the 80's), but there were also a lot of similarities. It wasn't that different from say The Cosby Show or Family Ties.

I think the interwebs changed everything. Sure there are some political changes and regime changes and some significant technological advancements. Compact discs were pretty cool (do kids today even know about those?) and the microwave was/is clutch. Looking back, I'm not sure how we managed having to get up every time we wanted to change the channel. But I don't think anything has had quite the impact that the internet has had, in the given time period. It's true what Oodain said about our unprecedented rate of advancement, largely due to the internet.

My husband and I joke that we'll be talking to our kids about 'the before time.' There will always be some big global threat looming. Some scary, evil nation(s) that supposedly threatens us all, but our communications have changed forever. We have instant access to almost anything at the stroke of a key (touchpad, voice, whatever). In some ways we're more connected, but in other ways we've become really disconnected. Before the internet, we had to deal with each other. Families might sit around the TV and rot their brains, but they'd do it together. Now, each member is off in their room, or with their face in their phone. We're always plugged in.

It's good and it's bad, and it's here to stay. To me, that's the big one.

I was there, so i have some minor quibbles. Not "there" literally, but i did pull up Tim Berners-Lee's site on a NeXT cube in the early 90's. I used Gopher a lot, and was a master at Veronica searches.

There have always been web sites, gopher sites, relay systems, etc, that are internal rather than external. If anything there is a much higher percentage of internal-use-only web systems now than there were in the early days.

What you're talking about may have been true for AOL users or whatever, but not so much for people connected to the internet through early bare-bones ISPs, services like Delphi, university systems, research institutes, tech companies, etc.

Then as now, public is public.

The main difference is that in like 1994 fall semester never ended.

Not so sure here as to the matter of "forward", but yes, a lot of "leaping" certainly *has* been going on!

Overall, I think the availability of virtually-instantaneous communications via satellite and so on and the tremendous increases in numbers of outlets and accesses are the only significant things making today seem so much different than days in centuries past.

http://www.truth-out.org/30-years-ago-t ... 1312641859

and, to beat a dead horse,

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Sold-Worl ... 584&sr=1-1

what you have to look at (& this goes completely against the way we are now in the habit of thinking about history, if we think at all) is not fashions but social relations.

I think that most of the culture of the United States seems to be about the same from the mid 1960's onward. You have the whole feminism/misandry, racism/reverse-racism, "peace" lovers, "evil warmongers", manned spaceflight as far as the moon, television and movies, gas guzzling vehicles, over-hyped marketing of everything, environmentalists going on about global cooling/warming/climate-change, and a fair bit of other stuff.

What's really different though is that the Cold War ended in the 90's and PCs actually became useful tools and cool gaming rigs, in addition to their role in internet addiction.