Imagining Social Change

Back in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, a 5MB hard drive weighed over a ton and cost $3,200 a month to lease. Now, we comfortably store 400 times that capacity on the 2GB flash drives attached to our key chains. In the middle of the 20^th century, people imagined what life would be like at the cusp of the 21^st century, and some of them were remarkably accurate. Through snopes, I found this 2-minute video from the early 1960’s. It’s fascinating! The creators accurately anticipated email (an “electronic correspondence machine”) and online shopping. They didn’t anticipate the drastic social changes that occurred in the 1960’s and 1970's that increased women’s political and economic power. They predict technological change, but social stasis; men are breadwinners who make the money and pay the bills, and wifey goes shopping and cares for the home. It’s like the creators of The Jetsons projecting 1950’s gender stereotypes onto the space age.

So, what’s going to happen in 2057? And why can we wrap our heads around technologies that are 50 years down the road, but we can’t conceive of social arrangements outside the present?

- Brian