Something that really emphasizes the impossibility of truly comprehending other cultures is that modern technologists and those interested in that area can’t even understand the culture of BBSes and shareware that existed in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. They haven’t a clue, and that was very recent and in the same field as they are currently interested in and/or working.

I lived through and participated in that BBS and shareware culture and am a current technogeek so I know just how skewed most representations of that era are. At the same time, I have no interest in writing a history of the era as that’d take just too much effort and research and I don’t have the necessary levels of nostalgia to turn it into a passion.

My larger point is that if people in the field can’t even understand something nominally in their same domain that happened less than 40 years ago, what hope do we have of understanding how the Romans or the ancient Mayans thought and lived?

My answer is that, truthfully, we do not.