[dalke]

Consider someone who died in 1955 at the age of 70. In their life they saw the introduction of: home electric providers, telephones, radio, movies, automobile, air travel (from nothing to the jet age!), nuclear energy, the polio vaccine, penicillin, color photography, frozen food, and more. There are also less known changes with deep impact: the introduction of municipal garbage service cleaned up our cities and improved health, the vertical filing system revolutionized data management, Linotype made it possible to have newspapers more than 8 pages long, the tractor, artificial fertilizer, and a mass of farm inventions opened up agriculture. Home refrigerators lets people keep fresh food longer and more cheaply than ice boxes could. Modern foods ranging from cornflakes to PEZ were invented during that time.

And you think the cell phone is more fundamental than, say, the widespread deployment of telephones in the first place? Before then, there was no way to have a voice conversation with someone more than a 100 meters away.

When the polio vaccine was invented "church bells were ringing across the country, factories were observing moments of silence, synagogues and churches were holding prayer meetings, and parents and teachers were weeping. One shopkeeper painted a sign on his window: Thank you, Dr. Salk. 'It was as if a war had ended', one observer recalled." (Wikipedia for Jonas Salk.) That vaccine still saves the lives of 100,000s of children every year even when compared to the 1800s. For that matter, before penicillin you could die because of a rose thorn accidentally scratching your mouth, as the sad story of Albert Alexander shows.

Tell me, how is the cell phone a more fundamental change than these?

[SoftwareMaven]

It is very hard for people to understand the impact of changes before their lives. All those things are "just the way the world is" for them. Conversely, I think it can also be difficult to understand how profound changes in the current day are if you aren't paying attention, and the world is big enough that there are profound changes happening somewhere that I may know is happening, but I don't understand how profound it really is.

And then, every once in a while, a polio vaccine is created, and the world is different for everybody. I certainly think the WWW is one of those. Facebook might be (800 million people under one roof is something, but I'm not convicted it is really changing the world).

[scott_s]

These are all excellent points, but I personally think that Facebook is a fundamental change on the order of phones in everyone's homes. That is, it is changing the way that most people communicate.

But, yes, overall, I think people tend to underestimate the radical changes that happened during the first half of the 20th century. By 1950, the "structure" of daily life was much closer to it was in 2000 than it was in 1900.

[molmalo]

You have a very valid point. I can't think of the enormous change the introduction of the home electric providers must have been. I mean, from candles to bulbs!

But then again, I think that the main difference now is the current rate of adoption of the new technologies. How many years took to build the electric system? How many years took the use of the mobile phone to become widespread? Everything moves faster and faster, and that's what is letting lots of people behind. They just can't adapt fast enough.

For example, my mother. Every time she has a new mobile phone, she asks me to teach her how to use it. I start saying, "Read the screen, think, decide and then press the buttons." Because, i tell her "if not, what will you do when even your TV has more and more menus?" Of course, she grumbles, but at least tries. And when she REALLY needs help to learn something, i help her.

And I see this pattern everywhere. Tech changes so fast now, that while a few people adapt extremely fast, and to some it takes it a little longer, to the rest, they're just tired of learning how to use new stuff, every now and then.

[dalke]

The complaint that people "just can't adapt fast enough" has been a near constant refrain for over a century. Read even the Wikipedia page about the "Roaring Twenties" and then tell me that the amount of change in that decade was slower than now.

Let's take some examples. Your baseline is the cell phone. The first commercial mobile phone was in 1983, so you're suggesting a time span of about 25 years. (Before 1983 it was possible to connect a two-way radio through to the phone system, but that's not the point you're trying to make.) By 1988, friends of mine had car phones. The StarTac phone came out in 1996 and marks the start of "widespread consumer adoption." But I would say that it took until 2005 where it started to supplant having a land line.

The first commercial (pre-built and for consumer use) radio receiver was in 1920. That marks the start of the "golden age of radio", which ended when TVs became more popular in the late 1950s. Surely that was as fast as the uptake of cell phones.

Semiconductor transistors were invented in 1947. "Transisterization" was so fast that crew of the Minnow had a transistor radio (in 1964) and no one was surprised by it. Transitors made entirely new categories of technology possible, so that we had a transistor-based game console (Pong-style "tennis" and "racquet-ball") in ~1975.

The first commercial (synthetic) detergents were introduced in 1933 (that's when Dreft was introduced) and "by the 1950s, soap had almost been completely replaced by branched alkylbenzenesulfonates." Not bad for 20 years! Actually it was bad, because we then found out it wasn't that biodegradable and had to find a replacement.

The neon light was first presented in 1910 and "became very popular for signage and displays in the period 1920-1940."

Prohibition lasted for 13 years in the US, and had a huge impact on daily life. That surely counts as an enormous change.

Cosmetics didn't become popular in the US until the 1910s, and the flappers of the 1920 used it with a vengeance. (WP says that previously it was too closely associated with prostitution, but the post-war trend was a reaction to the previously popular demure look, and that "[a] skewed postwar sex ratio created a new emphasis on sexual beauty, and because of the influence of Hollywood.)

All these big changes took place on the same time scale as the cell phone. How then do you measure the amount of change now, and compare it to (say) the amount of change in the 1920s? When was the last time that most people were not "tired of learning how to use new stuff"?

[molmalo]

You are right in most of your comment. And yes, people always has been tired of having to learn how to use new stuff (I can imagine a caveman grudging about having to learn how to start a fire. LOL)

But the scale and complexity is important too. You can't compare a radio with two dials, and a smartphone with lots of screens. It's a whole new level of effort to learn how to use it. It takes more time, and it stack over previous knowledge you are supposed to have. But I know lots of elder people who don't even know how to turn on a computer. And sadly, they reject smart phones and other new things because they just gave up.

[dalke]

I'm presuming that you've not heard much about the earliest radios. They had two or three batteries in them ("A", "B", and at the beginning, "C" cells.) Don't mix up the batteries when you wire them in and make sure you have the right polarity as otherwise you might fry the tubes. Batteries could easily leak, so check them out for problems. If you're on a farm, you might want one powered from your car battery, which meant you could take it back to the car or a generator in order to recharge it. Then there's antenna setup. And tube replacement (since tubes go bad). Also, the early radios (excepting crystal sets) usually had three or more dials. For example, when you change the frequency you need to change the impedance of your antenna to match it. (Raise the lid or read the owner's manual to find the chart of how those correlate.)

Radios got simpler to use, in part because of the strong demand to make them simpler. They got simpler to use sometimes at the expense of more internal complexity (a starter motor for an automobile, instead of a crank) but sometimes because we just figured out an easier way to do things (Wozniak's Disk II controller is a classic hacker example) .

On the other hand, you are omitting all of the difficult, complex things we used to do, which we don't do now. Do you sew all your clothes, bedsheets, and curtains? I sure don't. Sewing isn't easy. That's a "whole old level of effort" I don't need to know. Do you regularly can or preserve your own foods? A few do, but it's easier and cheaper to buy things from the store. Until the last 1800s, many engineers and scientists learned draftsmanship (as different than art, mind you) because that was the best way to make a visual record of what you saw. Of course, the camera has nearly completely replaced that requirement, which we use to learn different things. Evolution, thermodynamics, Maxwell's equations, and more have simplified what was previously a bunch of unconnected concepts.

Our culture rides the wave of "just complex enough." If it's too complex, like early microcomputers, only a few people make the effort to learn it. It it's useful enough, then there's a lot of work put into making it simpler. When it gets simple enough, there's widespread use. So widespread use happens when something is just barely simple enough for most people to understand.

The idea you are talking about is at least 45 years old. Alvin Toffler wrote "Future Shock" in 1970 about this very topic. It popularized the phrase "information overload", which was coined in 1964. Note how someone who was 20 then would be an "elder" now.

Again I ask you, how do you judge that the rate of growth is more now than it was in the 1920s, or the 1970s? What meaningful metrics do you use, and how do you correct for you own biases of what is important? As far as I can tell, excepting the Great Depression, the amount of change and the turmoil over the amount of change has been constant for over a century.

[dalke]

(typo: "even when compared to the 1980s", not 1800s. The polio vaccine "reduced the worldwide incidence from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 1,652 cases in 2007"; Wikipedia: Polio)