Eternal September may have brought us many bad things, but a very good thing is that it's now far, far easier to get an idea of how ordinary people live elsewhere (or even elsewhen, for a small subset of previous decades). Breaking a filter bubble is much easier than pre-VCR access to foreign or ephemeral media ever was.
As someone who grew up knowing that ICBMs were only 30 minutes away, I've been keeping an ever-growing informal list of things that were pop culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain. One of my favourites is the Duck/Chicken Dance.
I lived in Vientiane, Laos is a kid. Mail back home to the 'states was a three-month round trip affair with only about an 80% success rate. Phone calls to family were completely impossible unless we flew to Bangkok first.
Nowadays, I can click on any of a half-dozen free webcams that show the old neighborhood, whenever I want. It still kind of blows my mind, the improvements in the world's communication infrastructure when I think about it.
Eternal September may have brought us many bad things, but a very good thing is that it's now far, far easier to get an idea of how ordinary people live elsewhere (or even elsewhen, for a small subset of previous decades). Breaking a filter bubble is much easier than pre-VCR access to foreign or ephemeral media ever was.
As someone who grew up knowing that ICBMs were only 30 minutes away, I've been keeping an ever-growing informal list of things that were pop culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain. One of my favourites is the Duck/Chicken Dance.