Living in Nokialand and being in my late teens in 1994, I first went online in 2000, and had gotten a cell phone maybe two years earlier. I became aware of the Internet in maybe 1997 or so. So, I’d put the latest time etc. easily three+ years past 1994.
I was coming in to make the exact opposite point.
In 1974 and in 1994 you purchased music by going to a store and buying a disc that you took home and played on a dedicated device. In 2014 it isn’t just the physical medium that’s gone away; the whole idea of buying music is going away in favor of streaming services like Spotify.
In 1974 and in 1994 you rarely heard a good, currently popular song in a commercial, since that was considered “selling out”. In 2014 every band’s dream is to land a song in a commercial or TV show, mostly because nobody buys music anymore and it’s a way to make money. (Also, it’s a good way for people to get your music to people.)
In 1974 and in 1994 if you wanted to hear a new song you either had to wait for it to show up on the radio (or MTV) or take a chance and buy it. (That was especially hard in 1994 when the single had mostly gone away and you had to buy a whole album.) In 2014 any band you want to check out is a Google search away.
In 1974 and in 1994 there weren’t really that many bands and genres, and two high schoolers with radically different musical tastes had probably at least heard of the bands the other was into. Not so in 2014. I put a lot of effort into keeping up with music and I’m always running across bands I’ve never heard of who have enormous fan bases.
The way we consume music changed mostly in details between 1974 and 1994, and it’s changed fundamentally since then.
Well, personally, I could vote/go to any beach/sit in any train carriage/marry a White woman in '94 and 2014, I would not have been able to in '74 (Also, I was 3 ! :)) so I’d say 2014. YMMV. Offer not valid outside South Africa.
When I read the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, one thing that really jumped out was that back in the day, computers were for ‘geeks’. The majority of people didn’t own or use one. This changed after Jobs achieved his vision of high tech products being consumer items.
Lots of smart people told him this was crazy. At the time of that discussion (early 1990s), if you owned a computer and knew how to use it, you were considered smart, and probably did well in math and science.
Today, tons of people who never studied math or science are living on their high tech devices. Using a smart phone requires skills that would have marked a person as a computer nerd in 1994.
All this is to say that I believe the proliferation of high technology sets 2014 apart from 1994. Computers were around in 1994, but people didn’t need to know how to use them in daily life.
I’d say 1994 was far more of a souped-up version of 1974 than a watered-down version of 2014.
Music-wise in 1994, CDs were an improvement over LPs, but other than being able to use a remote to click past the less interesting tracks, they weren’t a big jump forward. And what **DoctorJ **said about music generally.
Mobile phones existed in 1974 and 1994, but even in 1994, most people didn’t have one, and you still needed a car for the power and the antenna, and all you could do on them was talk on the phone. And your cell phone, if you had one, was a supplement to your landline. If you didn’t have a landline, you didn’t have a phone. (Even by 2003, cell-only households were <3% of the population. (Massive PDF, see p. 138.))
In 1994, the vast majority of people didn’t have email, hell, they didn’t have access to computers to do email on. You had to master a bunch of obscure techniques to actually get anything from the Web, assuming you had a computer and a modem to begin with, because there were no Web browsers.
If you wanted to communicate with people, you got together with them in meatspace, or called them, or wrote a letter.
TV had more channels in 1994 than in 1974, but for the most part it was still just a somewhat more vast wasteland. TV has really stepped up its game in the past 15 years or so, but we weren’t there yet in 1994. You couldn’t even see it coming.
You could watch movies on VHS at home in 1994, which you couldn’t do in 1974. (DVDs weren’t around yet.) That was the big advance in home entertainment. And you were still watching them on a color TV that was pretty much like the one you had in 1974. Forget about 60-inch HDTV screens, Hulu and Roku and all that other stuff.
In 1994, you still did your shopping by going to a store. Or by getting catalogs in the mail, and calling the 800 number to place an order. Just like 1974. Amazon was still the river in the South American rain forest.
In 1994, you took photos with film. You dropped the finished roll off at the drugstore, and picked up the developed pix a few days later. You didn’t get to see your pix in real time unless you had a Polaroid camera and film, which IIRC was on the expensive side. If you wanted to share your pictures with friends and family, you’d have the drugstore make extra copies, which you’d send through the mail.
In short, in 1994, ‘the future’ was about to break through on us all, but it wasn’t here yet. We were still living in 1974+.
In my personal life, in 1994 I was married and had two young children. In 2014 I am still married to the same woman, live in the same house, and have two adult children.
So 1994 was much more like 2014 than it was like 1974.
I’d add that 1999 is more like 2014 than 1984. We’ve covered a hell of a lot of ground since 1999, but if I woke up tomorrow morning and it was July 1, 1999, it would feel like a watered-down version of now that I could still function semi-normally in.* If it were July 1, 1994, I’d feel like I’d had an arm amputated or something. And I wouldn’t even be able to rant on the Dope about it. 
*Of course, a lot of that is that I’m pretty much stuck in 2006, technology-wise. I don’t have a smart phone or tablet, I don’t do Facebook, I don’t read books on a Kindle or similar device, etc. So maybe it’s just that I’ve traveled less far from 1999 than most of my contemporaries.
But that’s true for most people - the rate of personal change slows down as we get older.
For instance, in the summer of 1974, I was between my sophomore and junior years of college. Between then and 1994, I finished college, did a bunch of things that were unrelated to my ultimate direction, got a master’s degree, taught for a few years, went back to grad school for my doctorate, met and married my wife, got my PhD, and became a college professor. I moved 19 times in those 20 years. (Of course, for a few years after college, my key possessions would fit in my VW Super Beetle.)
Between 1994 and now, I’ve had 3 jobs for 2 employers, and moved once. No new degrees, still in the same marriage. Became a father - that was kinda big. 
I remember all three years very well, and I think 1994 is closer to 2014 than it is to 1974.
Tru dat, but a lot of us more (chronologically) mature Dopers remember both 1994 and 1974 pretty clearly. So we are comparing two differences that we’ve experienced.
OTOH, while there may be a few of the oldest Dopers who have some memory of 1934, nobody here remembers it well. With 2014-1974-1934, we’re comparing a difference *experienced *with one we’ve heard and read about.
And with 2014-1914-1814, it’s a similar deal, at one more remove: when I was growing up in the 1960s, 1914 was a ways back, but not out of reach: my grandparents were teenagers in 1914, and could remember that era well.* But my knowledge of 1814 is strictly through the history books.
But 1014 is a hell of a lot more like 14 than it is like 2014. That one’s easy.
*I’d say 1914 is to 1964 as 1999 is to 2014: we had cars and airplanes in 1914, but they were only a hint of what they would later become. And in 1999, we had computers and the Web and cell phones and digital cameras, and they were also only a hint of what they would later become.