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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does communications tech usage date any work to a particular five-year period, because communications tech is moving so fast

Maybe in the last few decades. I recently watched You've Got Mail on an airplane and it really struck me as a warm and fuzzy period piece (this probably dates me, but the late 90s are generally considered to be a good time). Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan initially meet over email (AOL, dial-up) and hit it off online, sight unseen, despite being business rivals in real life. It's a major plot point when they decide to meet IRL, but then can't contact each other until they go home and log in. To someone who's had an always-connected smartphone in my pocket for at least a decade now, it's hard to think about how people really lived -- commuted, planned events and trips, and so on -- before.

Amusingly, the business drama in the film centers around Hanks' Big Box Bookstore moving in and displacing the small, local Shop Around the Corner (a classic movie reference) bookstore. But it doesn't foresee that the Internet, which is crucial to the story, will bring Amazon around to presumably drive the big store out within a decade anyway.

It really is possibly the greatest unintentional period piece. It couldn't have been written five years in any direction and made sense.