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Comment by mr_wobbly | Hacker News Reader

I'm 25, I think of the 80s as the beginning of the "modern" world. I guess it's the same for your students. Plus a lot of cool movies were made back then, and I imagine that's part of the reason why the 80s are considered cool.

I think you're 100% right, 1985 doesn't feel like ancient history at all.

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> I think of the 80s as the beginning of the "modern" world.

I was born at 1980, and that's exactly how I felt by the 90's time (that the 80's were the beginning of the "modern" world).

Maybe it's because it's true. There was a cultural transformation at the 70's, so that the 80's were completely different from the 60's. We didn't have any other such transformatio after that.

Politically, in the US at least, we're still very much under the sway of the 80s. The rightward shift is ongoing, and it seems to me that most of our modern mainstream political spectrum would fit pretty well under the tent of the 80s and early 90s right.

S&L and the housing crash could be seen as defining the pattern that the boom/bust cycle has followed since then.

This is the real elephant in the room. With the end of the Cold War, pretty much all systemic critiques of the American Way of Life were swept away, and any request of change was shut down for ever. America (as depicted in Hollywood movies in 1985) was crowned "best society ever" and social mores were frozen in place. As globalisation started to hit harder and harder, generating a timid backlash in Seattle etc, 9/11 happened... and again any critical point of view was banished. Even "western" foreign policy is basically still the same. No wonder Reagan was all but beatified when he died.

In a lot of ways, it was - popularization of home computers and home video playback/recording, the first commercial mobile phones, popularization of synthesizers, etc. So much stuff that was the first generation (in significant numbers in homes) of almost all the ubiquitous technology we now use.

I think it might just be hard for many of the people on HN to have an objective opinion about it. We might just think of the 80s as the beginning of the modern world because it's when we were born.

> I think it might just be hard for many of the people on HN to have an objective opinion about it.

Opinions are, by definition, subjective, and the issue here is a subjective question of feeling, not an objective question of fact, so, yes, its impossible for anyone to have an "objective opinion" about it, for a few fairly fundamental reasons. (And its not just limited to people on HN.)

Well, my point was more that "of course we think the 80s were significant because that's when so many of us were born", and less a discussion on the meaning of "opinion".

If some of the older posters (40-60 rather than 20-30) were to post a similar sentiment about the 80s then it would say more.

Edit: Alternatively, I'm very likely just projecting my age range on some posters who are in that age range, but them chiming up to confirm that fact would be helpful.

I was born in the 70s, and I feel my whole decade was left out of your age range.

People who are in their 40s now were teens and young adults in the 80s, and are therefore likely to agree that that decade was significant, and I can understand that (I'm 41).

Let me try to give a different perspective, though: Modern times seems to me to have started about when The Matrix came out and Google came along. It's truly amazing to me that we managed to get along without immediate and virtually unlimited access to any information about anything. Being able to just look things up completely changed my life. The internet was qualitatively enormously different when the best search engine was Altavista and most of my time was spent on IRC and Usenet.

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