To ask what was better and what was worse 30 years ago?

[PansyPotter84]

I’m 41 so my views may be tainted by my age…

Worse 30 years ago:

• Casual racism, sexism and homophobia.
• Cars (emissions nightmare and leaded petrol).

Better 30 years ago:

• Cadbury’s Chocolate (not full of Palm Oil Sludge).
• Disposable Nappies. The ones my little sister had when I was a nipper were thick and robust unlike the flimsy leaky paper things that my DC had.

Tattoos and other unsightly body customisation was deeply frowned upon in the 1990s and anyone in a customer facing role was required to keep them hidden out of sight. People respected their natural beauty and didn't obliterate it with dodgy fillers from some back street surgeon in Belgium or "Turkey teeth", breast implants, dying hair hideous colours such as blue or bright green and most people only tanned naturally, on holiday. We accepted and loved the bodies that God gave us and didn't all have to conform to look a certain way, poles apart from the society we live in today.

Are you sure about that or did you have a sheltered upbringing?

I think racism is so so much worse these days. It was always out there, I know. But 30 years ago there was a group of people who just kept it the fuck inside their heads, knowing it was shameful. That has changed for the worse IMO.

And how young women look - that homogenised Instagram look with ironed hair, several layers of make-up, puffed-out lips, fuck knows what's going on with eyebrows and lashes - that is worrying to me.

Really worry about the effects of youtube hyper 'masculine' brain rot as well. There's part of a whole generation of lads who are not capable of existing alongside women, never mind with them. Women are going to have to pay the price for that, that's how it always pans out. It's not that men were better then, it just wasn't so calculatedly blatant how awful they wanted to be.

We don't have any institutions we can trust to look out for us. EVEN the Tories in 1995 arguably wanted the best for at least some people (I disagreed with how they went about it). Now there is not a single political party who isn't simply toeing someone else's line, and nobody gives a shit if we sink or swim.

Now it's easier and cheaper to contacted people (mind you there's negatives to that too!!).

30 years ago there was no AI to create long winded replies on MN. 😀

There were some rare places that had internet, such as internet cafes in select big cities. And probably universities, yes. But for the majority of people, the internet was not on their radar. https://www.statista.com/statistics/468663/uk-internet-penetration/ Just 1.9 percent of the population had internet in 1995.

I think cell phones were a little more common. If I had to guess, I'd say around 8 percent of the population had them. But they were reserved for high flying executives or kids with rich parents. Even in the 2000s, if I wanted to make a telephone call whilst out, I would go to find a call box.

We first got cable TV in 2005. We first got internet in 2006. Our neighbours got these things around the same time. Before this, we occasionally used the internet in a library or the computers at school had them but not in every classroom. But this was after the turn of the millennium. There was a big push to get internet and computers in schools in the 2000s, so much so that supermarkets used to give vouchers to customers at the checkouts to take in to local schools for them to buy computers with.

Hmm; I’d want to look in more depth at the methodology and sources for the early part of that graph, @BigFatBully — it seems to me that it would be very easy to confound households with internet access and percentage of the population with internet access - they aren’t the same thing, and I’m not sure how you would make that equivalence work. Most people accessed the internet at work or at the library or at school in the 90s. My school had internet access in 1993-ish (bog standard comp in the north), and I used to go to the town central library to do research on the web. I had email at university in 1995, but via computer rooms, department computers and fixed network connections, not in my own room. Nevertheless, there was a thriving World Wide Web, and most big organisations had pages on it. I could email my Dad at his company even though my parents’ email access at home was limited. I did an internship in journalism in 1996 and most of my job was rewriting wire and web reports from Reuters. I graduated a year later and in my first job all our computers had Internet access which we used constantly (and we had access to telemetrical databases like accounts programs, library catalogues, databases like MEDLINE and eg. accounts programs like SAGE). My 1990s CV lists my Internet research skills and I still have my university emails archived on floppies (ah! How time passes!)

Even if people didn’t have much home internet, people were still accessing the internet at work, especially at school, libraries, universities, professional firms including accountants, lawyers, journalists and most big companies. We weren’t as green in the 90s as you seem to think!

Better: house prices
worse: my taste in men and life in general