Like the first radio stations had just started broadcasting when she was born, now we're all discussing her passing on a communications network that connects the entire globe. Possibly some of us while on flights from one side of the world to the other.
Telegraphy had allowed current news to rapidly flow around the globe for decades.
They were born without electricity, and everything it brought, and without cars or planes, and they lived to have pretty much all modern comfort and watch a man on the Moon on TV.
I don't think so. My grandmother was born in 1900 and died in 2003. Cars, airplanes, electricity, radio, TV, computers, space ships, etc..., all were invented or became commonplace in her lifetime. Queen Elizabeth was born between the birth years of my parents, who didn't remember the "horse and buggy days".
The Commonwealth of Nations an association of countries, but the Commonwealth of Nations does not control the government of any member country (even ceremonially). India and Pakistan are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, but are not Commonwealth Realms.
A book by Robert J. Gordon from 2015, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," goes through this in great and fascinating detail. The life of an everyday American in 1870, starting off with the chamber pot and ending with an early bedtime by candlelight, was hard to even imagine by 1940. As he lays it out , life in that year would be familiar to us: toilets and plumbing, mass media via radio & hardcopy webpage (i.e. newspapers), worldwide communication from home (telephone), refrigeration, etc.
Arguably it's not particularly different now than, say, 1995 - 2000, which is the half decade of web search indexes (AltaVisa = 1995) and banner ads (1998 = DoubleClick IPO).
Travel, media, appliances, transportation, Internet, perhaps even music and fashion, haven't as fundamentally changed since then.
She considered company websites as fancy brochures, but thought individual access to almost free global publishing was astonishing.
That kind of improvement benefits poor people.
It’s like the opposite of tariffs or sanctions: the people at the top are unaffected.
> A mix of June and 19th, Juneteenth has become a day to commemorate the end of slavery in America. Despite the fact that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued more than two years earlier on January 1, 1863, a lack of Union troops in the rebel state of Texas made the order difficult to enforce.
> Some historians blame the lapse in time on poor communication in that era, while others believe Texan slave-owners purposely withheld the information.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/abolition-of-sla...
It may not be as big of a leap as no computers -> personal computers or no internet -> internet but I wouldn't say that the world is "not much different" than 2000.
Social media in particular has the potential to be extremely disrupting to society. There are things which seem possible that would have been unthinkable in 2000 like the fall of American democracy. And that sort of societal shift requires more than just the internet. It requires a hyper-online society which is enabled by smartphones and social media.
1870-1970 (or about that range) probably would be bigger change. That would cover time from before commercial light bulbs to commercial computers[1] and man on the moon. Societally it would include WW1 and the series of Russian revolutions leading to wave of other revolutions in Europe[2], and major advances in Womens' suffrage[3] among other things.
[1] e.g. PDP-8 and S/360
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1917%E2%80%9319...
[3] "The Representation of the People Act 1918 saw British women over 30 gain the vote. Dutch women won the vote in 1919, and American women on August 26, 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage
The introduction of trains in the early 1800s literally changed the DNA of England. As people started to regularly traveled 100's of miles away from their villages.
The transatlantic cable was carrying millions of messages by the late 1880s.
American history tends to be written in a bubble. Some people in the U.S.A. were using chamber pots in the 1870s, by the 1870s London had a sewer system.
Too often the U.S.A. plays up a fantasy pioneer past. While in the U.S.A. people tend of talk of the 1860s as a time of pioneers and wagons, in large Western European cities Maxwell's Equations were being discussed in mathematics departments.
She remember the poland of poles in rural areas and germans and jews in the cities, which is how the entirety of eastern Europe looked like up to the urals. So many different languages spoken by populations for centuries.
She never saw a car or listened to a radio as a child and definitely did not have electricity at home till ww2 ended. When she died there were videochats.
Remember that mobile phones were already "StarTac" sized in 1996:
https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/the-evolution-of-ce...
As for social media, "Eternal September" was in 1993. In fact, I noted my grandmother's perception that people putting their thoughts out there was disruptive. In her mind that, like radio or TV that she saw get invented, this was obviously going to suddenly be everyone. So you're saying she was right. But she'd already seen it in the last millennium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
As for "fall of American Democracy", actually, the 1960s and early 1970s didn't feel a whole lot different from the recent summer of discontent, and remember that the LA Riots were 1992. And for someone around since 1900, 'fall of American democracy' was, at several points, not "unthinkable".
In any case, "social media" hundreds of years ago was called "pamphleteering" and, for example, contributed to French Revolution:
The Floppy Disk. ... Portable Cassette Player. ... The All-In-One Personal Computer. ... The Cell Phone. ... The VCR. ... The First “Real” Video Game. ... Digital Wristwatches.
They were printing reports from all over the world.
As an example the modern sporting event the Tour de France was started by a newspaper in 1903 and was reported on daily. That wouldn't really have been viable financially without mass communication. In fact the race exists solely to generate those reports.
There's a very good book called The Victorian Internet that covers early mass communication if you're interested[2].
In many other places of the world 1900-1990 had much less change in day to day life, whereas 1990-today has been a huge change.
The massive changes have just finally been getting spread around to everyone (still unevenly of course)