In 2019, I met a ‘time-traveler’ from 2002. Interesting experience. Here is what he said was the difference between then and “now”:
Lance gets it. He doesn’t understand it, but he gets that the way we communicate to each other has dramatically shifted.
Did y’all read about the time my daughter and her friends used their cell phones to prevent a rape? Probably not, it was my least successful OP of the past few years, garnering only 6 replies. It was pretty disjointed, to be honest.
I also started another thread about the nation’s “nahployment crisis”, noting that much of the reluctance to go back to $8/hour jobs was because cell phones opened up opportunities to people who would not have had those opportunities in an earlier era:
I understand that the OP is looking for ones personal opinion, and while I used a historical argument, that doesn’t mean there are personal observations that went into this. I paid off my divorce using mobile technology, in a manner which couldn’t be possible in 2006. I modify client documents while sitting in parking lots, something which wasn’t possible in 2006. My teen daughter gets word of a nasty situation as old as time itself and utilizes technology unavailable when she was born to prevent it.
So, my argument was historic based, but the personal anecdata is there as well. Mechanizing tasks is definitely ‘modern’, no doubt about it. But even in 2004 I couldn’t Uber (ride or drive), edit documents on my phone for my clients, prevent rapes by making hundreds of others aware of a single persons intentions, or have a conversation with people like Mark Cuban, Martina Navratilova, or even Darryl from Storage Wars, and this is all because of the truly modern shift which has occurred - the ability to reach hundreds of millions of people directly.
And a world where I can’t do the above isn’t really modern.