Looking (and Laughing) at Ridiculous Trends of the Past...and the Present

Sometimes people post old pictures of themselves and their buddies on my high school nostalgia website.  Everyone...especially the boys...has long, long hair that's screaming for professional style haircuts.  And those sad omnipresent bell-bottom jeans: give me a break! I don't know of anyone back then in the early seventies who deliberately preferred, on their own initiative, this style of clothing.  No, it was something that the fashion industry imposed on the population and one day, that's all people had to choose from...at least that's the way I remember it.  In any event, I think everyone looks kind of dopey in those old pics, and it's largely because they were following the herd mentality in trying to fit in and look like everyone else.  Don't think that I'm letting our present time off the hook.  Nowadays the "in" public appearance revolves around carrying one's cell smartphone in the hand, spending inordinate time looking down at it instead of paying attention to their ongoing surroundings and situations.  I know this because I regularly drive to work here in Gainesville down US-441 past the University of Florida, midday when the students are flooding the sidewalks with their presence.  Students who walking in couples or groups don't stare at the phones, but a large percentage of the "singletons" just go walking down the sidewalks...even crossing busy streets...with their eyes glued to their object, even when the sun is glaring down on them making actually seeing anything at least theoretically impossible.  I couldn't do that simply because I'm afraid I'd trip on something and fall on my ass...these kids must have an inner gyroscope guiding their motions!  I'm speaking from 1973 to 2023 here, but what will be it like fifty more years in the future, in 2073, when these very students are old fogies like me and are themselves observers of the passing scene: how will the inevitable changes manifest themselves?  I don't see this smartphone culture as static in the least.  Cyber technology will become more internalized and private, to the point I think that folks from the future will be laughing at images of these people stuck on their phones today.  In that sense I'm already way ahead of my own time.  On the other hand, those 2073 folks may be laughing at stuff they see from 2023 that I think is perfectly normal...  

Last Public Phone in NYC Removed

I was watching Good Morning America this morning and saw that New York City's last public payphone station...the enclosed booths disappeared long ago...has been removed, to be placed in a museum.  I remember in the old Superman fifties TV series how the Man of Steel would use telephone booths as a convenient changing station from his alter ego Clark Kent whenever a need for his superhuman heroics arose.  Then, in the 1978 Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve the first time Kent needed a phone booth he looked at an open-air phone station...like the one they just removed...and realized that it just wasn't going to work.  The old movies are full of folks using those good old phone booths...Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and The Birds, James Bond's Doctor No, and the classic spoof Airplane! instantly come to mind.  Oh, and the 2002 Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth naturally puts the outmoded old structure center stage.  And there's that old Gomer Pyle episode where Jim Nabors tries to put coins back into the phone that had earlier released them all...and gets arrested for theft.  Just think, back in those primitive bygone years people used to actually go outside without any phones to serve as a lifeline to whatever services they might need to access...scary times, scary times.  I guess it's our era's version of the old cliché where the wise old man would tell the spoiled young'uns that, in his day, he used to have to walk five miles in the snow to school.  Sadly, a smartphone is nowadays often deemed so crucially essential that some even feel hesitant to leave it behind them when they go into another room in their own home.  It's the real-world version of Bilbo Baggin's "precious" ring when one day he realizes he misplaced it and goes into a panic...