I'm amazed at smartphones and videochatting to be honest, but at some level it's something that seems like a natural evolution of what was there before. For ex

I'm amazed at smartphones and videochatting to be honest, but at some level it's something that seems like a natural evolution of what was there before. For example, in a lot of ways we live in a sci-fi future, if the number of classic films featuring videochats as a sign of the future is any indication. On the other hand, those films did basically get the idea right, that there would be some screen with some little speaker and microphone that you'd talk to someone through. If you go back a bit further though, like to the 1910s, there wasn't any idea of that at all. It was off the collective radar completely. So in some sense, we are living in some continuation of the early 1970s, in the sense it was part of a future we could accurately envision. But we're not living in a continuation of the same era as pre "golden quarter" in that we aren't really entirely part of the future they imagined (I think 1945 isn't quite right, I'd push it back to pre-WWI). At least that's one argument. I wish we could go back and time and interview a bunch of people who lived like 1900-1960+ about this issue, and compare it to what people who were born in, say, 1950, might say about it now. FWIW, my sense is that people in the mid-twentieth century underestimated change in communication technology and overestimated change in transportation tech.