zlacker

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.

>>nerdix+(OP)
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+N6
1970s maybe.

>>aemble+8d
Not at all, that was the decade personal/home computers first become available. It's also when Steve Jobs founded Apple.

>>nerdix+(OP)
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+ky
And electronic music took off.

>>tgflyn+N6
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.