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Society Marches On: Difference between revisions
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* ''[http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0743436067/0743436067__17.htm Cocoon]'', a short story by [[Keith Laumer]], has everyone living in virtual reality tanks a couple hundred years in the future. The husband "goes" to a virtual office and does virtual paperwork, while the wife sits at "home", does virtual housework and watches virtual soap operas all day. When the husband comes "home", he complains because the wife hasn't gotten around to punching the selector buttons for the evening nutripaste meal yet.
* ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' has several parts where social mores have not dated so well. One example is the alien from Betelgeuse who tries to pretend he's human, and English, by adopting what he thought was a very common name - [[wikipedia:Ford Prefect|Ford Prefect]]. While probably funny back when the first radio serial was released, the fact that he's named after a car that hasn't been around for nearly half a century completely ruins the joke, and to date ''no'' adaptation has changed the name to something like "Ford Focus" or "Ford Fiesta". Another possible example is the claim that humans are "ape-descended life forms" that "are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea". This was back when digital watches were fairly new but not totally ubiquitous, but reading it now, can you think of ''anybody'' in a developed world that is still that impressed with digital watches?
** The Quandary Phase of the radio series (based on ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish|So Long And Thanks For All The Fish]]'') alters it to "novelty cellphone ringtones ". This sets up a similar alteration later, where Ford hands cellphones with novelty ringtones out to a crowd. In the book, it was Sony Walkmen.
** Interestingly, when a comic book adaptation was being written (in the early '90s or so), Adams was approached about changing the line about "digital watches" to "cell phones", and he adamantly refused, insisting that the cartoonist was missing the point. So, what ''was'' the point? Well, um... er... ah! Cell phones are actually useful devices due to their mobility, while digital watches have no advantages over regular watches. So, Adams probably considered digital watches a pointless novelty while thinking that cell phones are actually useful. Uh, you know, probably.
** As shown in the television series, the watches he was talking about used power-consuming LED displays, and so you had to push a button to see the time. The joke is probably that Douglas Adams found those types of watches impractical.
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== Music ==
* ''Since I Met You'' by DC Talk contains the line "My 200 friends couldn't fill the void in my soul". Listening to this in the 90s, this seemed like a ludicrously huge number; but since the advent of Facebook, "200 friends" is, if anything, lower than average.
** Though considering the large number was probably meant to reference the obvious impossibility of being close to that many people, perhaps it's a rather good (if unknowing) reference to the empty vanity of adding people merely to increase the number appearing on your profile. But in that case 200 friends still seems a bit low.
* ''New Math'' by [[Tom Lehrer]] is an amusing song from the 1960s illustrating the strange new methods used in mathematics. Lehrer takes the audience through how subtraction is done using New Math, satirising how anti-intuitive it appears... except "new" math is now commonplace to a large portion of society, to the extent that Lehrer, snarks aside, seems to be illustrating the ''normal'' way of doing subtraction.
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*** The problem with the New Math was that it focused more on teaching children abstractions and using alternate base tables, than practical experience in solving 'normal' math equations (as Lehrer put it, "know what you are doing, rather than to get the right answer"). The system was eventually abandoned after it was shown that teaching abstractions to children seldom worked well: To quote maths professor George F. Simmons, it produced children who knew commutative law, but not the basic multiplication tables. Lehrer's song still ends up as an example, as New Math and its teaching methods were discarded shortly afterwards and has been out of the grade school curriculum for 40 years.
* Though still catchy enough that it's seldom noticed, [[Michael Jackson]]'s "Billie Jean" becomes this trope if you listen to the lyrics: nowadays, the accused in a paternity suit is more likely to whine about DNA test results than about how much the baby's photo resembles him.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
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*** Not to mention several jokes about the standard work week being ''9 hours'', based on the popular conception of the time that technology would allow people to work far less. Not only has the exact opposite happened for many people but cell phones and email has allowed bosses to contact employees 24/7 meaning that the separation between work and leisure has become blurred.
***** Technology has made productivity (at least in fields that use it extensively) skyrocket. What most futurists didn't predict is that we wouldn't work ''fewer'' hours, we'd work the ''same'' hours and just get 5 times as much done.
***** Most people rarely sees free time as leisure time, but rather time to use to get more work in for more money. Their parents and grandparents worked the same hours, but earned far less.
* Many future-themed classic cartoons, from [[Looney Tunes]] to MGM, fit this trope. In many instances, they even assume the ''dress styles'' of the era in which they were made will still be relevant in the future.
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[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Society Marches On]]
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