True.

I guess we're going to be remembered as scene kiddies and hipsters then, as they're probably the most outspoken in their practices. My old economics teacher, (a lady in her late fifties) defined our generation as "the facebook generation".

It depends on how you look at it, really. If you're talking about the idea that cell phones, for example, changed the way and the frequency with which we communicate that's hard to deny. The ideals of work, family, education, entertainment, etc. have changed in implementation but are still pretty much the same at their core. The differences in what the average person is focused on day-to-day are mostly in the details. Sure, there were times of drastic change (WWII for example), but if you adjust for that type of deviation the average person's life in the '50s probably wasn't that much different than the average person's life in the '70s. :shrug: I mean, radio was replaced by TV and the music was different, but people still went to work, came home, sought out some kind of entertainment or spent time with their families, etc.

You're forgetting that: Women couldn't vote and where mostly housewives, Blacks where treated like crap and the law (Jim Crow laws) supported it, Cars where completely different, Cigarette companies where allowed to advertise freely, TV was for the rich, Some people had ice boxes, etc. If you really look at it almost everything has changed. If you look outside of America you'll see a much bigger change.

I'm not forgetting any of that. I'm 35...I've seen plenty of things change in my lifetime already. When I was growing up nobody had cell phones and almost nobody had ever heard of this "internet" thing. Those two things right there have changed the world a lot...certainly a lot more than cigarette company advertising. I'm not sure what decade you're referring to, but by the mid '60s televisions were pretty common in homes.

Anyway, I'm saying that a lot of details have changed over the past 100 years, sure, but as far as day-to-day life is concerned things haven't changed all that much in the past 100 years compared to the previous 100. There hasn't been a really drastic change in lifestyle in most first-world countries since the 1800's when the full effects of the industrial revolution began sweeping across the world. Again, though, that all depends on what you consider "drastic." I know people that considered getting a DVR a drastic change.

I wonder if we're living the beginning of some big changes right now. Maybe someday soon they'll refer to this time period as the "Information Revolution."

Wha? I guess this depends who an average person is.

In the 1950's the southern US was still racially segregated by law and the north by racial redlining. Women rarely went to college and most didn't work outside of the home. They were rarely able to get a divorce, even if they were abused, and contraception was illegal in many areas. That means that more than 50% of the US population was basically an underclass. Surely that's a pretty big difference than today. I wouldn't want to be female / a minority in 1950 :unsure:

I think Softnerd is right about the whole lifestyle thing. Let's take an average man in his mid twenties for example. His day would consist of - as Softnerd mentioned - going to work, coming back home to relax, then seeking out some form of entertainment on weekends. Now, the medium which he uses to obtain said entertainment, or the form itself might have changed over the years, but the fact remains that he's following a similar routine as his ancestors were back in at least the late 1800s if not earlier.

A lifespan would consist of getting educated, getting a job, getting married, having children, and dying.

A lifestyle change, as Top killa suggests would be something like in the middle ages where if a boy is born the son of a blacksmith, then he too must become a blacksmith, and shall die as a blacksmith. There was a royal family and all were under them. Public executions were common and life expectancy was only about 30 or 40 years max.

Then further back we'd have life when there was no currency, just a barter system. Even further back, we have life where every man was a hunter. Now that is what would be considered a lifestyle change. Not switching from VCR to DVD player.

Sure, I'm not arguing any of that. I guess I should have explained exactly what I was trying to say a little better. Yes, things have changed. I was speaking in terms of, "can I buy milk from someone or should I raise my own cow, and will someone try to eat my cow if I don't defend it, and am I likely to die from this minor injury, and can I buy an already-built house or should I learn carpentry on top of my main profession" types of things, which are things that people are generally NOT referring to when they ask you which decades you like.

If you go back far enough you'll hit times when people were too busy trying to survive the winter to worry about human rights and civil issues.

Edit:
Holy Assassin is smelling what I'm stepping in.

Anyway, didn't mean to derail the thread. It was just a off-handed addition to a completely different point that I think was taken out of context...which is mostly my fault for not explaining what I meant.

I'm not sure. It's a subjective issue, but I think '90s rock really took off because people were tired of the plastic, over-produced pop that dominated the charts from about the mid 1980s but for me at least it never reached the dizzy heights of 1970s rock. In terms of the forefront of technology, I think it seemed much more exciting from about the '50s until the mid '80s: it was a much bigger deal in popular culture, but after a last bout of techno-fandom in the early '80s it seemed to largely give way to bean-counting. Though I agree that a lot of technology has been made available to the masses more recently it's... I dunno, it's got a bit soulless.

It certainly has gotten soulless. Most notably in cars and bikes. Cars back in the 50s and 60s had real character, and so did bikes. I say keep your Hayabusas and 2011 BMW 7 series', modern automotive industry. Bring back the '67 Impala and '49 Matchless!