response 1 of 23:

Mar 13 18:46 UTC 1995

 I have a LOT of Life Magazines from the 40's and 50's. The car ads are
something to behold. Also interestimg is NaT Geo's from that same era.

response 3 of 23:

Mar 6 02:18 UTC 2003

q
q
B

response 5 of 23:

Mar 6 17:58 UTC 2003

These days people spend 2-3 hours watching TV - back then it was 2-3 hours
reading.

response 7 of 23:

Mar 13 02:54 UTC 2003

I don't think it was that big a difference in literacy, althoug technically
your statement is true because there were fewer people in total.  ;)

Really, though, 100 years ago (I did some web searches for "literacy" and
"1910" and didn't come up with anything obvious, but it looks like literacy
has been pretty stable since before then) the great majority were literate.
Probably bigger divisions in application between city (newspapers) and farms
(the Bible, the almanac).  Farmers would also be intensely interested in
things like cars, because they were the ones with long distances to travel
and heavier stuff to move around.  Plus there would be a lot going on with
application of science to farming - a number of ancestors on my mother's side
were involved in that area (Check out the Andrew Boss building at University
of Minnesota if you're ever in St. Paul - my great grandfather).

response 9 of 23:

Mar 14 08:41 UTC 2003

I think people were *more* literate around the turn of the century than
today.  That was before TV, radio, most forms of mass media other than
the printed word, etc.  If you wanted to keep up with family in other
cities, you had to write.  If you wanted to keep up with the latest
fashions, you had to read.  If you wanted to run a large corporation,
you had to read and write, and if you couldn't write yourself, you had
to be able to understand the process of writing well enough to dictate
effectively.  This is back when the telegraph was still king, and
long-distance telephony was still something of an impractical novelty
(remember, this was before any practical voice quality amplifier had
been invented).

Even if you just wanted to be entertained, you still had to read -- only
a relatively few rich people living in large cities could have afforded
to see plays on a regular basis - anybody on a farm (and most people
were still rusticated) would have instead been reading popular
magazines, or perhaps getting together with friends and reading plays or
playing music or whatever.  Those popular magazines survived into the
20's, although the invention of the cinema eroded their popularity, then
the invention of talking pictures and the popularity of broadcast radio
made it possible to get stories through other means, and television
merely completed the process in the 50's.

In the 1900's, only rich people had cars -- farmers (except the well
off) and other ordinary folks couldn't afford cars until Henry Ford
drove the cost low enough to make it even more affordable than the horse
(which was, in its day, expensive, of limited functionality, and a major
source of urban pollution which had to be removed at considerable
expensie.)

response 11 of 23:

Mar 14 17:06 UTC 2003

(Re #9: Psst: "around the turn of the century" occurred in 2001. I've been
wondering what is the best way to now refer to around 1900....  "Around
the turn of the previous century"? Seems awkward, and, which previous
century? "Around the turn of the penultimate century?" Nahhh...  "Around
1900"? That'll do it.) 

response 13 of 23:

Mar 15 22:00 UTC 2003

It's pretty popular for people who see themselves as intellectuals to complain
that "people" (by which they mean people who don't share their interests and
socio-economic level) "are less literate today."  I don't think that's borne
out by the facts, or the massive number of people reading the web and using
email -- which, studies have shown, is cutting into the time they used to
spend watching TV.  It *is* true that people read less books, and are far less
likely to hand-write a letter (I don't think I've done one in 10 years, apart
from thank-you notes and holiday cards), but they're reading and emailing.

response 15 of 23:

Mar 16 01:11 UTC 2003

There's always been a tendency to denigate the current generation as
less cultured and wise.  Been true at least as long as writing.  But I
also think a case could be made that people have shorter attention spans
today, and are less critical (and I don't mean "negative" when I say
"critical" here) about what they read.  Mention was made above of ads,
which is certainly interesting because I don't think you can easily
separate the effects of technology from the underlying differences in
society.  Today, ads rely heavily on color and emotion.  A lot of
attention is put into designing ads that will still be effective even on
people who aren't paying attention.  A century ago, ads could not take
advantage of color, the readers were not as rushed and impatient as
today's readers, and the science of passive persuasion was clearly not
as advanced.  So many more ads relied on words, language, and logic
rather than on a pretty limb and a likely catch phrase.

response 17 of 23:

Mar 20 00:48 UTC 2003

So true! 

response 19 of 23:

Apr 21 21:31 UTC 2003

Judging from the overwhelming popularity of the gulf war, I don't think
"the web generation" is quite as skeptical as you claim.

response 21 of 23:

Apr 24 13:19 UTC 2003

(Apart from being the ones sent to fight it, that is.)

response 23 of 23:

Apr 24 16:16 UTC 2003

I've also heard "Gulf War II".  The official name doesn't seem to have
caught on the way "Desert Storm" did.