It is an interesting question - how much effort does it take to understand the real world nowadays?
And I think that the answer is "it varies" - using a mobile phone to make a phone call is pretty simple, working out the cheapest tariff for your usage, pretty darn hard, understanding how it's changed the way people interact with each other, mindnumbingly hard.
There's a trade-off though - in some ways life has changed vastly in the last 15 years - the internet has, in many ways "changed everything" - but on the other hand western society is much stabler than at any point in the past - nobody has invaded anyone else in Europe for a good few decades, the religion of the next monarch won't cause consternation and fear amongst large chunks of the population, and even the number of revolutions and coups is down to a dull roar.
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Date: 2006-03-07 12:49 pm (UTC)And I think that the answer is "it varies" - using a mobile phone to make a phone call is pretty simple, working out the cheapest tariff for your usage, pretty darn hard, understanding how it's changed the way people interact with each other, mindnumbingly hard.
There's a trade-off though - in some ways life has changed vastly in the last 15 years - the internet has, in many ways "changed everything" - but on the other hand western society is much stabler than at any point in the past - nobody has invaded anyone else in Europe for a good few decades, the religion of the next monarch won't cause consternation and fear amongst large chunks of the population, and even the number of revolutions and coups is down to a dull roar.