How would the 60s have happened if they had today's technology?

Many of the posts here speak of a return to the 60s, of it somehow happening again. I got to thinking...how would it have been different had there been the technology of today? What would all the turmoil and intensity of the era have done with the internet, satellite TV, cell phones, DVDS, and game consoles? Discuss.

 

are we assuming they didnt happen the first time, so this would be all new and all the time between then and now had occured differently than it actually has?

 

As if we went back to say 1965 and gave them all sorts of modern technology. Or if they just were that technologically advanced on their own, but it was still Tim Leary, Ken Kesey, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Jim Morrison rocking the decade.

 

Think of it this way, as I think of it. It would of distracted them from seeing what's really going on in the world--much like now.

 

I'd have to be concerned with the effect of today's weapons technology on the Vietnam war. Satellites pinpointing Viet Cong bases and troop movements, bunker buster missiles blasting out Viet Cong tunnels, a smart bomb sent to kill Ho Chi Minh! Our superior technology couldn't win the war for us then, but could the innovations since then make the difference? Or would they at least extend the war?

 

Quote: Our superior technology couldn't win the war for us then, but could the innovations since then make the difference? Or would they at least extend the war?

I'm not an expert on politics but no I don't think the advances in technology would make much of a difference in Vietnam. This war in Iraq ended quickly (so the US government says) but still there is no real peace in Iraq. The US forces are still there and there are no plans to pull out for the immediate future. The US government is still interfering in world affairs the way they did in Vietnam. They have learnt nothing and their new weapons didn't help.

I agree 100% with what backtothelab said. And because of that perhaps the hippie movement wouldn't have even started. Everyone too absorbed with obtaining the latest gadgets and losing touch with what's most important.

 

There were plenty of gadgets back then. We had TVs, stereos, radios and muscle cars, and they weren't enough to distract us from what was going on. If someone gives a damn about what's happening in the world then nothing will keep them from getting involved. Likewise if someone doesn't give a damn then they don't need anything to distract them.

 

Imagine the war we coulda fought with the current technology.

 

You're right newo. A flick through my beloved collection of Reader's Digests from that period reveals ads for the latest record players, cassette recorders, transistor radios, cars, televisions, Kodak cameras, etc. I just feel like the latest gadget has more importance to people today than it did back then, but I may very well be wrong since I was not around.

 

ironic as this may seem to some of the younger members here,
the 60s were actualy born of the emergence many of today's
tecnologies, both as irritants but also as or more importantly,
as enablers.

it really started with computers 'escaping from the labs'
which came about due to mass production of transistor tecnology
inturn incentivised and supported by the space program.

micro-computers like we have today didn't exist yet, but discrete transistor based 'minis' did and were starting to make computing power available to smaller colleges and universities instead of their previous limiting due to expense and just plain unfamiliarity to government, military and fortune 500 companies.

what all this has to do with woodstock and the summer of love, the intersection was the unlikely late night sessions of the signals and systems sig of the model railroad club of m.i.t.

i know that sounds totaly unrealed, but one thing lead to another. these were the first amature as opposed to proffessional full time programers, who created the first real actual computer games. well the wider availability of computing power and the idea of simulations led to the formation of the idea of simulating the dynamics of actual human societies. this led to what was called the 'club of rome report'.

it was that, in combination with the age curve distribution, the dawn of the space age, kennedy and dr king having been shot and so on, along with the enequities so arbitrarily visited on a tiney nation in asia by the most militarily powerful on earth and the rightfully rightious reaction to all that which gave birth to all the hope and innovation and inspiration which took place in the late 60s and early 70s. civil rights, anti-war, all of that, came ultimately, though few knew about it at the time, and fewer still seem to be awair of it now, well it really all started with that club of rome report, even as the popular environmental movement just a few years later in the early 70s began with racheal carlson's silent spring.

of course today's tecnologies have evolved a lot further since then
the one redeaming feature of the 80s was to put computers and ultimately this internet, within reach of people with only moderate average incomes. and the nuts and bolds of wind/solar/alternative energy were as yet only a dream then, but like what this internet has given us, one eagerly looked forward to.

obviously it wasn't all gain. the golden calf sacred cow automobile has become the defacto state religeon of corporate capitolism and its equivelent to stalinist collectivisation. identical tactics of economic coersion having been employed. as alternatives to it have ever since and continue to be eroded.

we've pretty much lost the true working middle class that was the overwhelming majority in the 50s and 60s and like the term 'family farm' exists today primarily as little more then political euphamism.

but the 70s, which were the gift of the 60s, did give us for a while, a solidly signifigant victory of civil liberties over economic stratagie, one which a bizzare mix of knee jerk negativity and otherwise complacency and lack of vigilance bamboozled us out of in the 80s, everyone immagining that by selling out their hardwon freedoms we'd somehow all get rich. well obviously NOT EVERYone. but appearantly a signifigantly powerful majority, (who were neither silent nor moral, whatever the forces that conned them may have been and still are trying to pretend)

which brings us up more or less to today, though glossing a myriad of details
(and yes i WAS contemporary with that time, though i can't claim to have contributed much one way or the other to it, having graduated high school in 1966)

=^^=
.../\...

 

Wow themnax, you've intellectuall-ed me out of contributing any further to the discussion. My brain cells have conked out. But I will say it was rather poignant that you skipped straight from the 80's to today - both "me" decades

 

WOuldnt the internet as we know it today have added to the movement that occured. It is (IMHO) impossible to stop information from spreading via the web. MAinstream Media is pretty much exactly where it was then, but they can broadcast live from the deepest Jungles in Vietnam if they choose.....but no one can stop the stream of information on the net, it too easy to be annonymous. I do think that the old flop houses woulda had to work a little harder because no really wants to be with a stable internet connection....but I was born in 1973 and admit I dont know jack...but I got opinions....

 

^^I agree. The internet's really the only free media left. There's no rules here(within reason); complete freedom.

You all need to realize though that by the time vietnam came running around the corner the media had just started showing news broadcasts from overseas. Vietnam was the first war to ever have complete footage. It was "real" footage in the sense that when you saw footage from vietnam, you saw raw, unadulterated footage. If someone had a clip of a soldier's arm getting blown off, the news would show the guy's arm getting blown off. Now the news is much more biased and controlled. You don't see what's going on in the literal sense(you don't see footage) and in the greater sense that if no one tells you, you don't really hear about it. Look at the patriot act... there are people now who don't even realize it exists. In fact, I was just talking to a teacher in class today about it, and several other students spoke up saying they had no idea about it. Back then, they just came out and showed you how it was. Not only that, but alot of people were drafted, so obviously there were people with alot of nasty shit to say about the war. It was some pretty horrific shit. Also, marketing to the child/teen market did'nt begin till the mid fifties. They just did'nt do it before that. So within ten years or so, all these companies we're feeding these kids ads in such an obvious manner that they rejected it. Now that the industry has gotten 40-50 years under it's belt, it's a little more attune to how kids think. Kids now are born into a corperate lifestyle now. Our whole society is this big ad and it's hard for kids to break free of that.

 

Considering I had read "How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market" just a few years before, I might have started online trading and been well on my way to becoming a capitalist pig (or at best a yuppie, which wasn't even a word yet) by then!

Somebody put a copy in with the newspapers my scout troop picked up during a paper drive. By the time I got around to using it, I had lost the original, and before I had a chance to buy a replacement, I made many of the same mistakes Nicolas Darvas had before he stumbled onto his "technofundamental" system.

By the time I wrote s/w to spider Yahoo for data on 8000+ stocks to analyze and started making money, it was all I could do to tread water while I siphoned off my IRA to supplement my unemployment over the last 2½ years!

 

Retirement? WTF is that?

 

I read this after I posted mine below, and you're probably right. Instead of (hypothetically) becoming a capitalist pig, I could have done what George Soros has been doing with his billions. Bush wouldn't have stood a chance, and we might even have a Democratic Party George McGovern could be proud of!

 

Hey man, me too (class of 66, that is). I sort of got into computers back in 1968 already, in that I took (and flunked, due to tripping and skipping) an introductory computer science course. In those days, you had to keypunch your program and look at a WATFOR error-code chat to see why it didn't compile. The job card was one that was given to us to identify us as low-priority newbies (and keep us from trying to hack, I guess), so it tried our patience trying to make any progress. Eight years later, in grad school (after dropping out and dropping back in to finish my B.S.), I took a course called Computers in Chemistry, which was taught by a real hacker-type (and hippie!), and I took off from there. By then, the DecWriter, pen plotters, and 110/300-baud acoustic couplers were commonplace and monochrome monitors were coming into use, which made for faster turnaround, and cardpunches, for those who still wanted a deck, were automatic.

 

We'd be fried.

 

Marvellously interesting piece of introspection from someone who remembers first-hand.Thankyou.


Yes it's is a clever question & I think that the 1960s would NOT have deleloped into the experimental & liberating decade it was with TODAY'S Technology.
As the previous post indicated;much of today's technology comes from the 1960s.The invention of integrated circuits I believe was from the 1960s. The ARPANET formulated by the U.S.Military in the 1960s in case of nuclear war is the forerunner of today's INTERNET.
The Transistor revolutionised the 1950s & 1960s -The Space Race Technologies & the Cold War galvanised America into a technology quantum leap.

The 1960s were really about what had gone on BEFORE the 1960s.People often overlook this.

The experimental nature of the whole decade was a break from the norm & traditions of the dull-grey robust past.


Thanks.

 

Much of the usefulness of technology depends on who is controlling it. If you look at all the wars and government take-overs throughout history, one of the first things the government does is shut down the media or control it.

We have cable and satellite TV today, but much of the video news in the U.S. is controlled by a few giant multi-media conglomerates (Viacom, Fox, Time-Warner). The video that people in the U.S. see from Iraq on mainstream TV news often originates from embedded reporters who are obligated to go where the troops go, is cleared by the U.S. government, and is often sugar-coated and made palatable to the U.S. general public.

Much footage isn't even allowed, such as the views of the coffins coming into Dover AFB. That's a far cry from what was happening with raw footage coming from Viet Nam in the 60s and 70s. Even though news sources and technology were limited in the 60s, the coverage wasn't censored like it is today.

Try to find TV news networks that originate outside the U.S. on U.S. cable or satellite networks (EuroNews, Newsworld International, NHK Japan, CCTV). It's not all that easy. A friend of mine thought that the Chinese government had censored the whole mission when China put a man into orbit last year. The entire event was on CCTV and there were journalists from all over the world in China covering it. Most of the U.S. networks didn't cover it. Judging by the way mainstream networks ignore world events, you might think that China had censored the whole thing, when in fact the U.S. networks were the ones who really 'censored' it.

One of the more bizzare patterns I've noticed recently is how Hollywood is now becoming a venue for news and propaganda (movies by Moore and others). It used to be that one would watch the news to get the news and go to Hollywood for entertainment. Now people are watching the 'news' to get their entertainment and are going to Hollywood for their news (or at least to see uncensored footage of what's happening in places like Iraq).

Another venue that is opening up to grass-roots people is FTA (free-to-air) TV and radio. These are low-bandwidth compressed digital channels that are transmitted by satellites. These signals require a special FTA receiver that costs about $100-$300 and a satellite dish. The technology has opened up a new venue for groups that couldn't afford wide-bandwidth analog transmission. An example is Chuck Harder's 'People's Network'. He is a grass-roots type of person and covers topics such as world events and consumer advocacy, and the information is not filtered by a corporation or the government. Chuck Harder's page:

http://www.chuckharder.com/

Not many people in the U.S. are aware of FTA. It's more popular in Europe.

Even FTA is not immune to government interference, however. The FTA TV channel Al Manar was recently taken off U.S. satellites after the U.S. government declared it a terrorist group. No satellite wholesaler would touch it out of fear of being accused of aiding a terrorist group. Al Jazeera is still available on U.S. birds but it too is vulnerable to being taken off the airways by the government, much the same way it was kicked out of Iraq by the U.S. government last year.

The internet is one of the few large-scale venues left that isn't yet controlled by corporate or government interests. If the government wanted to, they could simply tax the internet so much that the average person wouldn't be able to afford it.