People used to spend their time listening to the radio. My family, when I was a kid and we had not yet gotten a TV (we were in fact the third family on our block to get a TV, and my aunt and grandparents already had them) used to sit around the radio in the evening, in a darkened room—just as though it was a TV. Maybe we were rehearsing for TV.
Nowadays boys of a certain age skateboard and play video games. Plus, of course, the time that girls as well as boys—and adults—spend on computers, with social networking sites, chat rooms, and so forth.
So there have been changes in how people spend their time. Whether these things mean far-reaching changes to society—well, that will be the subject of articles, books, and dissertations for a long time.
Another big change to society has been the so-called "sexual revolution." I was an adolescent just before some of the consequences of the invention of the birth control pill really began to be felt. So "in my day," young men and women did not have sex as much as young people do now. A horny young man who was going out on a date, and who thought that he might be able to have intercourse with his date, wanted to be prepared by having a "rubber" in his wallet. But they were not easy to come by. Unlike today, they were not on display out in the open in stores. They could only be gotten from a drugstore, and they were kept behind the counter—so you had to ask for them. If it was even legal for minors to buy condoms (and I frankly don't remember), young potential condom buyers would have been reluctant to try to buy them. A far change from today, when they might be handed out in high schools!
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
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