Technology has allowed people to do things that would have seemed impossible to the people of the past. For example, we have airplanes and cell phones which allow rapid transit of ideas and objects around the globe. But technology has also created habits that must seem absolutely absurd to the people of the past. This is highlighted in Body Ritual Among the Nacirema wherein the actions that we perform on a daily basis are recited back to us with a word choice that masks the true meaning of the wording until after the truth (that WE are the ones being described) is revealed, at which point a second reading only serves to highlight the degree to which we did not understand our own actions.
Had the piece gone through the trouble of describing us as we use our computers and so on, I'm quite sure that we would have been fooled into believing that the Nacirema were a bunch of loony fools that spent far too much time praying at rocks (or perhaps it could have expanded that by describing office workers or something of the sort). By extension, our actions today no doubt will seem absolutely inconceivable after a few generations.
In any case, it would appear that our actions must appear as strange to the people of the past or future as the concept of, say, using a joke as a weapon in war seems to us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3k7hKCdPcI
Oops.
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