just now realizing how much growing up in a very rural area shaped my (lack of) awareness of technology
like, the tech they use in the fruits basket manga (camcorders, cell phones with cameras, dvds, etc...) is all very much stuff i associate with the late aughts. i got my first cell phone around 2007, and my first camera phone around 2010? and my first smartphone at the end of 2011, and was still using my handheld digital camera through most of that time period. my family used dvds and vhs about equally until 2008 or so.
but like... that tech was all in a manga that was in publication from the late 90s through the mid-aughts. and it's shown that dvds were commonplace, as were cell phones and camcorders, and people could put the videos they recorded onto dvds which is a tech i definitely didn't have until 2010 or so. but not only does that manga take place in tech-forward japan, but in tokyo.
i wasn't even that unusual at my high school. sure, a lot of kids got cell phones before me, and i didn't even have texting until like a year into college, but it also wasn't that weird to not have one. cell phones were something rich kids had through most of high school for me. dvd players, too.
but then, i went to college in a city, and i've lived in cities since then. my parents and brother all moved to cities around then, too. no wonder i felt like tech was progressing so fast once i was in college - it wasn't the tech that was progressing, it was my access to it
anyway, this post is brought to you by overhead projectors (the kind that used transparencies) and wireless landlines and the dial-up internet noise and the tv cart at my old middle school
