I ’ve been around these parts for a while now. Apart from a few years there where I dropped out of Uni and wandered aimlessly around the northern hemisphere, I’ve spent most of my adult life in Dunedin. As I rode my incredibly hipster fixie bike around North D last weekend, I was struck by how much it had changed. Gardies: gone. Bowler: gone. Even the House of Pain has been replaced by a younger, sexier, cooler version. We harp on about it a bit, but I think we can forget just how much the world has changed in the last ten years, and the massive impact that must have had on the way that people view the world, and their place in it. The changes in technology over the last ten years has been faster than ever before. And more than ever before, the advancements have been directed towards providing products and services to individuals, rather than to humanity as a whole. Whether this consumer driven tech advance is a good thing or not is probably another editorial all by itself. But it is interesting to look back at the changes that have occurred in such a short period of time. Between the 1950s and the 2000s, T.V managed to advance from black and white to flat screen. Between 2000 and 2012 we’ve gone from the first MP3 players to the iPhone and iPad. And incredibly, the pace of tech advance is gaining speed. We can’t even imagine the changes that are going to come in the next ten years (if you really want to freak yourself, check out the wireless transferring of electricity).
With all this in mind, I present, entirely for your entertainment, the world as it existed when I was first year:
01 You used to be able to take your own crate of beer into the Bowler
02 There was no Campus Watch, or Code of Conduct.
03 There was no wireless internet.
04 There was one sushi place in Dunedin. There were two decent cafés.
05 You went to the Octagon to go to the movies; there were no bars there.
06 No one had heat pumps in their flats.
07 There was no YouTube.
08 America hadn’t invaded Iraq yet.
09 iPods weren’t available in New Zealand.
10 There were three flights a week to Auckland.
11 Aunty Helen was starting her second term as Prime Minister.
12 There was still interest on student loans.
13 Facebook didn’t exist.
It really was another world.
- Joe Stockman
Editorial | Issue 8
