The advertisement on the google website (copyrighted and owned by google, refer to (Google’s images) was a real advertisement in the 1950s! It appeals to the men of the middle century era to go out and purchase “The Chef” for their wives, it does everything except cook, because after all “that’s what wives are for!” This ad was not viewed as derogatory or even demeaning to women at the time because this is how women were viewed. The women in the 1950s were expected to only cook and clean, and take care of the children. They must have embraced that as well because there was never any dissent (until the 1960s of course). Should there have been earlier? Some women are completely fine with, and feel entirely fulfilled by staying home and doing all of the above. But I can tell you that my generation (I am twenty-one) is expected to do much more! We, as women, are expected to cook, clean, take care of the kids and have full time careers (hopefully big-time careers). Where do these expectations come from? I expect all of the above from myself. But mainly society dictates the trends of the era. Perhaps we will look back in forty years and think the same thoughts of primitiveness and simplicity about now.
This is one of the beautiful things about evolution. Evolution doesn’t always have to be biological. We can also evolve socially and from a societal standpoint. With each new advent of technology, it changes our perspective of the past. I would even go as far to say that we do not, or rather can not have a genuine frame of reference about society in the present until you can see it in retrospective. Well, some would argue this to be false since we understand and all seem to concur that texting and driving is dangerous, and that the ubiquitous nature of technology is impairing our social skills. They should anyway.
Society’s atmosphere and vibe, if you will, is dictated by what? Usually what makes the most money and or what is the most remarkable. This is so dynamic by nature that everyone seems to be scrambling to keep up. There has been such an enormous jump from the above advertisement’s era, and now from a technological standpoint that it is almost incomprehensible. What will happen to our accelerated society? Do we just keep chasing, inventing, and prospering, ad infinitum…? There must be a stopping point one would reason, but as our book states, “The most surprising thing that could happen in the future,” according to futurist Edward Cornish, “is if it offered no surprises, especially since the future has surprised us so often in the past” (Using Information Technology, Williams/Sawyer p.486).