When we laugh at 1980s screen grabs, Lisa said it is the laughter of relief and hope. “A lot of big, potentially scary things happened in the 1980s that anticipate our fears about the future even today: computers became part of everyday life, blurring the boundaries between work and play and world and home; the world lurched one step closer toward a truly global economy, destroying entire classes of labor while creating complex and not necessarily better new ones; the AIDS and crack cocaine pandemics made clear that there was no national or international consensus on how to handle public health crises.”
“But as so many of these 1980s screen grabs remind us, through it all, everyday life went on—and just as those everyday people from the 1980s survived whatever newsworthy crises got them on television, so, too, shall we,” the professor concluded.
