Cool and Uncool, Brought to you by 8-tracks!

Here are a few pairings of things that are cool and things that are not.
Cool/Uncool
Stephen Colbert/Larry King
Facebook/E-Mail
Moderates/Extremists
Marijuana/Tobacco
Soldiers/The Army
Metal/Emo
Wikipedia/Encyclopedia
President Obama/Speaker Pelosi
Christian/"Hardcore" Christian
Evolution/Intelligent Design
Internet/Computing
Socialized Medicine/Socialism
IHop/Waffle House
Hacking/Network Security
Pirating/Buying
Star Wars/Star Trek
Spending/Saving
Gay Marriage/Gay Sex
Fluent Spanish/Mandatory Spanish
Promiscuity/Male Virginity
Contraceptives/Unplanned Pregnancy
Windows XP/Windows Vista
Linux/Windows and Mac
Cassettes/.mp3
World of Warcraft/Dungeons and Dragons
Indifference/Obsession
Retirement/Work
Pride/Humility
Relaxation/Ambition
Power/Submission

This list of cool and uncool things shows something about the state of coolness in America. Much has remained unchanged for coolness in the past few decades in the realm of cool. Extreme socialists and hyper-conservatives are still uncool in politics, however, despite a distaste for socialism, people want the government to provide health care as a universal service. In addition, having sex with multiple partners is considered cool while boys who are virgins past the age of 16 are uncool. Power has maintained itself as a necessity for cool, but this power is especially cool when it allows a person to delegate tasks while relaxing on a boat. However, there have been some changes in coolness that are mostly due to the education process. For example, while having a lot of sex is cool, unprotected sex has become uncool. This is a result of increased education over sexually transmitted diseases and sexual education in general (except for abstinence programs). After seeing videos of men and women with herpes, unprotected sex suddenly becomes much less cool. Another aspect of coolness that has changed because of education is the acceptance of evolution as a valid idea. As more school children learn of evolution, they begin to shun the idea of intelligent design as wrong. Regardless of the actual truth behind the past (which is hard to uncover without one of these), evolution will continue to be cool as long as it is taught as correct.

One part of cool that will always change but be cool in the same way is new technology. Ever since the widespread use of new technologies past World War II, every piece of new meaningful technology has been adopted as the coolest thing to have for that time. The easiest way to see this is the evolution of musical storage and playing devices. Records and record players were around for long enough to simply be considered a static presence in the method of listening to music. However, with the introduction of the cassette tape, people began to get rid of records and replace them with the newer, smaller format. With a cassette deck in a car or a boom box on a shoulder, people could listen to music while traveling around. This trend continued further with the introduction of the Compact Disk (CD), and in recent years, CDs are being replaced with portable media devices capable of storing entire discographies and hours of videos while being smaller than a CD case. Ultimately, new technologies are cool because they offer a greater capacity for more fun and less work. E-Mail was very cool in the 90's because it offered a quicker way to send information than with a phone call or letter, but Facebook is now cooler than E-Mail because Facebook allows people to communicate socially with even less effort than E-Mail. As we roll into the 2010's, our current technologies will be swept into the realm of uncoolness as newer technologies give replace them as material representations of coolness.