There's a classic science fiction novel, The Forever War, which explores this idea as well - because of relativity, when the soldier returns from his battles he is speaking almost entirely a different language.

Edit: Corrected from Starship Troopers to The Forever War

The Languages Of Pao by Jack Vance is another classic science fiction novel that explores the impact of language on anthropology (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). For example, the warrior caste speak a dialect that encourages aggression.

Another one is Babel 17.

Also along these lines: Return from the stars by Stanislaw Lem.

Spoiler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars

I think you are thinking of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.

Yes! Thanks for the correction

There's also '39 (the queen song) where the relativistic travellers come home and find everyone they've ever known or loved are long dead.

Although I know people who are grandparents who are probably far more technologically sophisticated than a lot of teenagers are. More generally though, there is just a lot of culture, ways of doing things, lived experience, etc. that are--if not bubbles--more disjoint between different ages and other demographics than not. It's probably really hard for a teenager or young adult in western society to really imagine a world before the internet, smartphones, home computers, etc. and all those imply. You had to watch whatever was on one of three channels at a specific time of night?

> You had to watch whatever was on one of three channels at a specific time of night?

True. But then again, far less TV was watched. There was an occasional good show, the rest was filler that was pure drivel.

There's a reason kids played outside with their friends in those days. There was nothing to do in the house.

The stations would broadcast a test pattern at night.

Looking through and old tabloid newspaper from the early '80s I was amazed to see that the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it. Nowadays you have endless recommendations and reviews of what's coming up, and endless analysis of what's been on (e.g. just last night was reading the House Of The Dragon episode recap in the Guardian). What was most striking is that I don't remember TV being so low-key in the culture, nor how it crept up in importance, despite living through the change. Edit: Briton here.

>What was most striking is that I don't remember TV being so low-key in the culture, nor how it crept up in importance, despite living through the change.

TV was anything but low-key in culture. In fact because everyone watched a show at the same time, there was much more cultural synchronization/watercooler talk with respect to shows like MASH or Seinfeld.

What did change beginning with maybe the Sopranos was that (a limited slice of) TV became more high culture and displaced film to a certain degree in that regard. (And streaming enabled the sort of serialized drama that was hard to pull off in a fixed time slot broadcast world.)

>the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it.

True, but in the US, TV Guide magazine was I believe the most subscribed to magazine in the country. That's where a lot of people got more detailed (though relatively still quite limited) information from.

> What was most striking is that I don't remember TV being so low-key in the culture

That is really interesting. For want of a better way to put it, I also agree that it had a "long-tail" quality to it; it was just implicitly part of the status quo.

Communication nowadays seems to be broadly impacted by disproportionate focus on explicit definition, disambiguation, structure, etc, but in such a way that abolishes and shuns implied cohesion. Constantly trying to define and underline the way things should be instead of just getting on with letting things be the way they already are. My current chicken-and-egg "hmm" is whether this came before or after the worldwide obsession around security and safety (which arguably started just before the turn of the century - I once read the "no no stay inside" thing started in America circa 1998).

From this perspective I definitely think TV occupied more of the "tribal knowledge" side of written vs implied culture, than it does today - both in terms of production and societal impact. Kind of weird, that; it had more of an impact when it wasn't trying to shoehorn and corral. Heh.

I lastly wouldn't say that TV "crept up in importance" so much as turned into a vacuous foghorn contest to see who can bellow the hottest air the furthest :P

(AU here, aka UK Lite Edition)

I don't have a breakdown by demographic but people in general "watched" (whatever that meant exactly) a lot of TV--up to almost 9 hours per day per household at peak. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-... And a lot of traditional TV is still being watched, although it obviously skews older.

A lot of people simply turned the TV on as background. It doesn't mean they were watching it.

I remember daytime TV in the 60s. Jack LaLane's exercise show, aimed at bored housewives. You had to be desperately bored to watch that. There were daytime soap operas, about as interesting as watching paint dry (they were aimed at bored housewives). Then there were variety shows the local TV stations themselves produced aimed at preschool kids. Like the Krusty the Clown show on the Simpsons. The shows were just a camera pointed at a stage and the host tried to figure out something to do. I bet those shows are all lost from being taped over. There were talk shows, which were very cheap to produce. Game shows, which I never understood the attraction of.

The better stuff was prime time evening. I liked Daktari, but that was a half hour once a week. Movies were very rarely shown. The evening news 30 minutes was popular.

When Star Trek TOS appeared, that was amazing. Even my very skeptical dad actually said it was good.

It's not that I didn't want to watch TV all the time. I did. But there was very little to see on it. Much more fun to go outside and meet up with the neighborhood kids and do kid stuff.

That's massively hyperbolic. I can walk the streets of Rome and understand most of what was written 2000 years ago on the walls, and I was always a mediocre student in Latin, just the latin-derived languages are close enough.

You’re right, but when you try to explain a cell phone to the most learned Roman, how far do you think you might get?b I’m guessing they will try to have you locked up, or worse.

Eh, just tell them it's a magic trinket that allows you to see and hear others with such a trinket from far apart. It's not like the average person of today's understanding of cell phones is significantly more sophisticated.