I grew up in the 60's and 70's. I first heard about the blues during my first lessons on bass guitar. I began to be able to recognize blues progressions, boogie beat, and other elements of the blues that were present in those days in much of the popular music. From there I went to buying records of the bands that featured blues elements such as Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Allman Bros, and Lynyrd Skynrd (note: both British and American). At this point I was still unaware that blues had originated in African-American tradition. The only African-American music I had been exposed to was the Motown sound my older brother listened to and which I (at that time) detested. As I reached my early twenties in the mid-late 70's I grew disillusioned with the rock/pop music available and turned increasingly to the blues for my entertainment, naturally discovering Chicago blues, then acoustic blues through blues revivalists such as John Hammond, and eventually the old recordings (re-issued) by Blind Willie McTell and Robert Johnson, etc. So I guess you could say that technology brought about my appreciation of the blues because 1) I listened to rock bands playing electric guitars; 2) some rock bands played blues (including rythm & blues) on electric guitars; 3) some blues performers played electric guitars, and didn't sound all that different from rock bands; 4) listening to rock bands was socially acceptable in my peer group; 5) since rock bands played the blues, the blues was also socially acceptable as long as it sounded like rock; 6) the increasing use of high technology such as synthesizers in rock/pop music engendered changes (techno-bop, cyber-punk, new wave) in the music scene which began to disagree with my aesthetic sensibilities, causing me to seek elsewhere for my main listening pleasures and to arrive at a conscious decision to focus on the blues, starting with that closest to the already familiar rock I had listened to, followed by excursions into acoustic blues driven by curiosity; 7) Reissues of old blues became available; 8) I got married, graduated college, gave up ever playing bass in a rock band, and switched to teaching myself acoustic guitar because I could play it solo; which 9) increased greatly my interest in acoustic blues almost to the exclusion of rock, electric blues (and indeed all other music for a few years). Also, computer technology has been a great help starting with using a music program to play some of the selections from my guitar books to help me learn them. I have recently discovered a method, using sound software available on any Windows machine with a soundcard and CD-ROM drive, of recording snippets of music from CD into memory and playing them at half speed in order to help hear fast or tricky instrumental passages. And of course, modern technology can be used to clean up the old 78's when reissued on CD, to make them more enjoyable for us all. As to why some people prefer the Doors to Howlin' Wolf, as I implied above, I think that conditioning and peer pressure are major factors.