Cultural Lag Quotes

The civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

If the world ends, I'll just head on down to Kentucky because they're always 20 years behind.

My music tastes are often 20 years behind.

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.

At 15, I was modeling. I had to do my own hair and makeup. I also made my own clothes because I grew up in South Africa, where fashion was six months behind because of the seasons.

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

I grew up in Chicago, but I spent a lot of time down in Kentucky, and Kentucky was about 20 years behind the life that was in Chicago.

I think that the revolution in music is over, and what's left is a mop-up action. It's a matter of the news getting out to everybody else. I think that the important changes have already happened, changes in consciousness. It's mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that. Everything is traditionally slow - much faster than it ever has been on earth but still far, far too slow.

We still refer to sunrise, sunset. That only has meaning if you think that Earth is in the center of things, and everything is moving around us. So even though we know intellectually Earth goes around the sun, the language is still pre-Copernican, as we would call it.

To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.

It's fun conjuring what people will be wearing in the future. We exist in this world today, and yet there are people walking around who still look like they're in the '60s.

Tell me what the world is saying today, and I'll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.

I think that popular culture takes a long time to catch up to what's actually happening in the world. Women have had to take care of themselves for quite a while. Actually, not had to take of themselves, but have wanted to take care of themselves, so I think it's a big transition that our country and our society has been going through a long time.

There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.

The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

I love the Beatles. Now I know I'm a good few decades late on this one, but I've always been behind the curve.

Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

We were like deaf people trying to dance to a beat we couldn't hear, long after the music actually stopped.

Mainstream culture is like your mom: It's always a little late to catch on and gets easily confused by technology, but it means well.

Americans are a decade behind Canada when it comes to sex education and understanding their bodies.

I'm about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.

At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth.