zlacker

> Arguably the largest change in humanity in a ~100 year span?

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".

>>tgflyn+(OP)
Agree with you. The world today is not much different from the world my grandmother left behind, born ~1900 died ~2000.

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.

>>tgflyn+(OP)
My Russian great-great-grandmother was born in 1898 and died in 1998. She witnessed tsarist Russia, communist Russia and democratic Russia. That was quite an experience. I always was kind of jealous because she could compare the regimes first-hand.

>>Terret+r3
I would say that massive adoption of smart phones and social media have been pretty big.

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.

>>kgeist+Ra
That's quite a way to put it. Someone living through 1908 - 2008 would've also witnessed the start of Putin's autocratic Russia as he manoeuvred to keep power despite ending his second term.

>>nerdix+2c
What surprises me is how little technological progress appears to have occurred in the last decade (ie. 2010-2020). I think you'd be hard pressed to name a decade in the past 50 or even 100 years where the technology available to the masses has advanced so little. Note that I'm excluding things that are still mostly at the research stage, like deep learning, advanced language models, etc., since I don't think those have had much effect on people's lives yet.

>>tgflyn+Pi
1970s maybe.

>>tgflyn+(OP)
Dont underestimate recent changes. Your grandma never saw a smartphone, modern electric car, online food ordering, Netflix nor went on a Tinder hoookup. :)

>>aemble+ap
Not at all, that was the decade personal/home computers first become available. It's also when Steve Jobs founded Apple.

>>tgflyn+(OP)
My great grandmother was born in the Habsburg Empire, her daughter in Nazi Germany, her son in communist Poland, she died in modern polish republic. And she never moved an inch, that's how many different rules and governments had southern poland in her lifetime.

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.

>>nerdix+2c
Folks had mobile phones in the 90s. Most folks I worked with had them.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer

>>tgflyn+mK
And electronic music took off.

>>tgflyn+Pi
First Google hit for technology invented in the 1970s:

The Floppy Disk. ... Portable Cassette Player. ... The All-In-One Personal Computer. ... The Cell Phone. ... The VCR. ... The First “Real” Video Game. ... Digital Wristwatches.

>>Terret+r3
I think a lot of this depends on where you are standing. In the West, 1900-1990 was a huge difference in life and how it was lived, and less so between 1990 and today.

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)