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Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall.
The Beloit College Mindset List, which this year is as old as the entering students themselves, is created by Ron Nief, Emeritus Director of Public Affairs; Tom McBride, Emeritus Professor of English; and Charles Westerberg. Additional items on the list as well as commentaries and guides are found
here and at www.themindsetlist.com Regular updates and discussions are on Facebook and Twitter.
Previous lists are available online dating back to the Class of 2002.
Among the 50 entries I found it interesting that, from their perspective, there's always been Google, South Park, and mass-produced hybrid vehicles. What is/are your favorite(s) and why? What did they leave out?
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday August 20 2015, @08:03PM
They have never known a world without The Simpsons
The American ones have never known a politically gridlocked Congress
They have never had to learn how to program on finicky mini-computers and mainframes (as I did)
They have always had a mobile phone
They have always had free domestic long distance service (through their phones)
They have always had access to legal abortion (in the US), which is in my mind not a good thing but that's my sense of morality talking
The Republican party has always been dominated by neo-con, semi-fascist idiots
They have no memories of the Cold War, of a divided Germany
They have probably never seen an LP, a 45 RPM single, or a 78 RPM record
They may have never bought a CD.
They may have never bought any music.
They have probably never driven a car without a "check engine" light or a catalytic converter.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 20 2015, @08:08PM
Ronald Reagan said that during the 1980 campaign.
The very height of the Cold War was not the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @12:35AM
The very height of the Cold War was not the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Humankind is very lucky that "The other guy blinked" in 1962.
The young, cocky, inexperienced US President kept playing Chicken with the USSR, a nuclear-armed nation capable of destroying the planet's ecosystem. [wikipedia.org]
If it wasn't for the older, wiser, more mature Nikita Khrushchev realizing the magnitude of the situation and showing extreme levelheadedness, life on Earth would have been exterminated.
Even that doddering old fool, Reagan, didn't put the Earth in such peril as the naive[1] Kennedy had.
[1] Remember the Bay of Pigs fiasco the previous year?
Every time there has been an example of a guy who averted Armageddon, whether it was not launching a nuclear torpedo at the USA fleet [wikipedia.org] which was dumping depth charges on his submarine off Cuba
...or the 1985 case of "The Man Who Saved the World" by ignoring an early-warning SNAFU [wikipedia.org] instead of telling Soviet ICBM Command to launch everything they had onto the USA, that guy has been Soviet.
...then there's Barack "No Nukes" Obama who wants to piss away $1T on an upgraded USA nuke arsenal. [hngn.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @09:03AM
Well, what exactly did he say? Did he say "I want a world without nukes"? Or did he rather say "I want to get rid of the nukes"? Because the latter could well be interpreted as "I want to get rid of the nukes, to make place for better ones."
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 20 2015, @08:15PM
its a reseller for AT&T.
But only if you call a land line, and only in certain countries.
The prices on land lines are a scam.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday August 20 2015, @08:20PM
1. The Simpsons was just beginning its decline when they were born
2. Yes they have. What the fuck do you think 2010-today has been?
3. By the time they were old enough to learn to even maybe program, they could have been learning mobile development
4. Addressed in the article, 1997 phones were giant and clunky(and expensive).
5. Per #4
6. The were born 2 decades after Roe v Wade. Not relevant, really.
7. True! You could argue that 3 years of their life were mostly scandal-mongers rather than neo-cons.
8. No, and not only that, they wouldn't really even remember Gorbachev, Putin has been in charge in Russia their whole politically aware life.
9. Not only that: cassette tapes are also a bit old for them. CDs were dying when they got their own first music.
10. Oh, I see. you got that one.
11. Ditto.
12. True!
(Score: 1) by Post-Nihilist on Thursday August 20 2015, @08:41PM
I disagree on #1, I happen to like the new Simpson, since the switch to widescreen they double down on lighthearted absurdities.
Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!
(Score: 2) by Francis on Thursday August 20 2015, @09:15PM
Simpsons is OK if you don't mind the fact that it's 95% recycled content by volume. I haven't bothered to watch in years because it got to the point where they were just assembling new episodes out of old jokes. It was still funny, but it never did any better than in the 7th season.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2015, @08:22PM
I'm 49 and that holds true for me.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @01:09AM
Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, running against LBJ.
In that previous generation, the guy they called "Mr. Conservative" had a vision of a very muscular USA military.
(He retired from the USAF Reserve as a Major General (2 stars)).
You may find it shocking, however, to learn that when it came to how to treat working people he had a -true- Conservative understanding of social responsibility. [googleusercontent.com] (orig)[1] [commondreams.org]
[1] "medical insurance for all his employees"
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Flyingmoose on Thursday August 20 2015, @09:01PM
They have always had access to legal abortion (in the US), which is in my mind not a good thing but that's my sense of morality talking
The Republican party has always been dominated by neo-con, semi-fascist idiots
Hypocrite much?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @12:05AM
Or just self-aware.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday August 21 2015, @05:41AM
Not at all. I find the practice of abortion to be abhorrent, but that does not make me a neo-con or a semi-fascist idiot. It's not an "all or nothing" thing. You won't find me standing in front of an abortion clinic carrying gory pictures of aborted fetuses. But I won't shed any tears if it is banned in the United States either.
But then, perhaps I am a hypocrite in a way. There is an abortion in my past, about 15 years ago when my girlfriend and I were playing Catholic roulette and we lost. I paid for an abortion and it was done, but my views on abortion were different then than they are now. I'm older and wiser now, I've come to realize just how awful and immoral the practice of abortion is, and I deeply regret the decision we made to end the pregnancy. But I recognize that this is a, in the end, a personal decision to be made by the woman and her partner and I feel I should not impose my beliefs upon them.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2015, @09:28PM
Yeah, the Benoit list seemed plodding and unimaginative.
Newspapers, magazines, and cable TV is how old people get the news.
The idea of a personal computer without a connection to the Internet (except temporarily, as in a airline trip) is ludicrous. What could that be used for?
Minicomputers were always a dead technology, in the sense that no new R&D was being done.
The best golfer in the world is very likely to be an African American.
Climate change is considered to be a much greater threat to humanity than nuclear holocaust.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday August 20 2015, @09:36PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Friday August 21 2015, @06:04AM
They have never known a world without Rohypnol.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @09:00AM
As far as they remember, Apple has always been in the Music business.
China has always had a sort of capitalism; it's communism only refers to the political system.
As far as they remember, Putin has always been in power in Russia, either as president, or as prime minister.
Computers were always able to beat world champions in chess.
Windows was always an operating system.
There has always been a telescope in space.
To them, war in Afghanistan always means Americans fighting, not Russians fighting.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Friday August 21 2015, @03:50PM
I am a programmer that was born in the late 70's and I have never had to program on a mini or a mainframe. (I did do some work on a java app that communicated to a bank's mainframe a decade ago. They managed to have y2k bugs in 2005.)
When I was a kid in school in the 80's it was all Apple and in highschool in the 90's it was PC.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh