What would surprise Captain America? The sequel

[lolaraincoat]

So there were a lot of excellent comments on the first edition of this post (both the LJ version and the DW version) but then they made me think about what I left out, so here's some

Comments

[blacksquirrel]

Regarding computers, I think this varies for your personal surprise-o-meter, because I was born in 81 and *I'm* surprised by computers a lot of the time. Just because a lot of the basic infrastructure had been in place for a long time doesn't mean that what we are now able to do on a daily basis isn't still pretty amazing and awe-inspiring.

I suppose that to me, I always think about this in terms of my brother being born ten years later, and how different his life and his generation is - because they grew up taking computers for granted in a way that I did not. This makes me think of the show Life - about a policeman wrongfully imprisoned for ten years from the mid 90s until 2006 or so. That's much less time than Steve, but really, some pretty impressive technological things have become a part of daily life in a way he's completely unfamiliar with and unprepared for - those were a pretty important ten years for digital technology - and his often repeated line is "It's like living in the future!" which I love because sometimes *I* just have to step back and look at my digital camera and my phone that streams video and sends e-mail and can access so very much information instantly and think *woah*! This is so far *beyond* what I ever thought living in the future might have been like when I was a child in 1988.

[np_complete]

Lola, correct me if I've got details wrong here, but I think Steve might be more bemused than surprised by computers, cellphones, and iPods. One of the several Golden Ages of science fiction would have been going on while he was a teenager. He would have seen wrist-communicators and "communication screens" on the covers of magazines -- heck, in Dick Tracy.

I think he might be disappointed how far we hadn't got with space travel. In the fifties they still thought that by 1980 we'd have colonies on Mars. He'd probably expect luxury hotels on the Moon by 2012.

[lolaraincoat]

Yes, that's it exactly. "Airports have gotten really big and impressive, but where's my personal jetpack that they promised me in True Science in July 1937?"

[lolaraincoat]

I mean they thawed him out too late for him to even get a ride on the Concorde, poor guy.

We Live on a Spaceship, Dear

[executrix]

Not that there's a control group of Thawed Guys from his cohort, but before being frozen, Steve had the unusual experience of getting super-soldier serum (and ours is better than theirs because his face isn't made of felt and his nose doesn't come off)* which might make him pretty blase about tech stuff anyway.

Also, I just wrote that Steve still takes his coffee black with two sugars, due to a well-founded suspicion of iceboxes--one thing I haven't seen discussed much is Steve's growing up during the Depression.

*What with Harry Potter, there seems to be a degree of nasal anxiety going on, as well as the whole Travis, Xander, Blake, Nick Fury eye-threat thing.

Re: We Live on a Spaceship, Dear

[lolaraincoat]

"I miss Postum!"

Good catch on the icebox. I wonder when sugar started coming in packets instead of in cubes?

Flying Monkeys--I Know This One!

[executrix]

Actually I don't for sure, and I'm too lazy to dig out my copy of "Perfection Salad" which would probably say, but I bet it was a 1910s-1920s sort of thing because it would play into concerns about food purity.

I mean, there would be places with packets of sugar, but anyplace Steve would go, right after the waitress finished marrying the ketchup bottles she'd fill up the sugar shakers.

Found this, wanted to share

[heidi8]

I follow a Tumblr called OldAds, and they scan and share ads from magazines from the 20s - 60s - this was one of yesterday's:



And her cellphone is larger than the ones from 1986, but pretty much the same shape.
...seeking for you - at your spoken command to an "electric thinking machine" - all the known facts about any subject on earth...

Re: Found this, wanted to share

[lolaraincoat]

That's brilliant! Thank you!

The other day I was reading a Mexican movie industry newsletter from 1940, like you do, which reported on a meeting among producers and distributors to discuss the looming threat of broadcast television to their industry. The first TV signal was actually broadcast in Mexico in 1954, and until 1968 there were large parts of the country where no signal was available.

The larger truth here is that everything happens earlier than you expect, and nothing ever happens all at once, and nothing ever goes away completely.

[lolaraincoat]

See, I was born in 1962, the moon landing is one of my earliest memories, and computers don't surprise me all that much. I think if you start out with computers, you can be impressed by how great they are and how fast they've improved, but if you don't, well - I started from a point where the computer was sort of like a typewriter, except more expensive and not as good. So yes they are awe-inspiring if I stop to think about it - I can carry more books in my pocket than would fit on my first-year-university bookshelf! that really is awesome! - but they aren't completely shocking, in the way that the sudden (relatively sudden) end of residential segregation was, for instance.

[blacksquirrel]

Maybe what I meant by computers is what you meant by consumer electronics - because I don't mean that computers exist - but instead I mean the specific things computers can do and how they've become part of daily life.

Which is still of course partly a function of class. Because pre-serum Steve may have imagined flying cars in the future when he visited the Stark expo, but I'm not convinced that he imagined himself owning one. So on the one hand there is the technologies of computers and the infrastructure of the internet, but on the other there is the idea that a scrawny orphan from a working class background can have access to all the libraries in the world. And I do think that's a genuine surprise. That's the surprise my working class 8 year old self couldn't have imagined in an 80s where cell phones existed, sure, but only for the very very rich, and never in my wildest imagination for me.