> Also, don't take what I wrote to be "No one could have predicted this" but rather someone teleported in time would be just amazed about these aspects of ubiquitous information retrieval.
The interesting thing is if you move that window just a couple of years forward to about 1995 and just after I'd seen Windows 95 and AOL and multimedia CD ROMs, I don't think nine year old me would have been amazed by the 28 years of difference at all. Bigger, faster, everyone uses the internet instead of brochures and often instead of TV... all of this seems obvious and this "social media" thing everyone in the future is obsessed with sounds a lot like the description of Usenet in the 1995 how to use the internet book. People use it for work, but why wouldn't they? (nine year old me didn't have a particularly sophisticated idea of work, but he was used to Dad having a home office and knew that was why he bought the new computer). The basic form was nailed early on, it just took time for the user base and infrastructure to catch up.
Smartphones are cooler, I guess. The tech's less cool without understanding the innovations in capacitive touchscreens and just seeing it as a neat hybrid of phone/console/PDA, but even with cellphones already being a thing, there are a lot of nineties plots revolving around the assumption that person A and person B wouldn't communicate whilst on the move, never mind look up information to solve their problems.
> there are a lot of nineties plots revolving around the assumption that person A and person B wouldn't communicate whilst on the move, never mind look up information to solve their problems.
Yeah, movie and TV writers have been really struggling with how to maintain dramatic tension since the smartphone. Could be a reason why we have all the junk superhero sequel movies, and all the junk serial killer TV series, where all the action is post-facto.
The interesting thing is if you move that window just a couple of years forward to about 1995 and just after I'd seen Windows 95 and AOL and multimedia CD ROMs, I don't think nine year old me would have been amazed by the 28 years of difference at all. Bigger, faster, everyone uses the internet instead of brochures and often instead of TV... all of this seems obvious and this "social media" thing everyone in the future is obsessed with sounds a lot like the description of Usenet in the 1995 how to use the internet book. People use it for work, but why wouldn't they? (nine year old me didn't have a particularly sophisticated idea of work, but he was used to Dad having a home office and knew that was why he bought the new computer). The basic form was nailed early on, it just took time for the user base and infrastructure to catch up.
Smartphones are cooler, I guess. The tech's less cool without understanding the innovations in capacitive touchscreens and just seeing it as a neat hybrid of phone/console/PDA, but even with cellphones already being a thing, there are a lot of nineties plots revolving around the assumption that person A and person B wouldn't communicate whilst on the move, never mind look up information to solve their problems.