- people eat plants and animals
- people pay money for goods and services
- there are countries, sometimes they fight, sometimes they work together
- men and women come together to create children, and often raise those children together
etc, etc, etc
The “bones” of what make up a capital-S Society are pretty much the same. None of these things had to stay the same, but they have so far.
Internet and the last 30 years tech did change things dramatically. I bet that most people would feel handicapped if they were teleported just 50 years back. We got into this type of life progressively, so people didn't notice the change, even though it was dramatic. The same phenomena with gradient changes happen on physiological level too, this is not different.
At least if we're using the technological singularity was what constitutes fundamental societal change in unpredictable ways. The singularity people think AGI is going to fundamentally change everything, even more than what the past 500 years has done. Certainly many magnitudes of order more than the last 50 years. And they think it will happen much faster.
As well as those, the change from food and goods being scarce to abundant roughly corresponding with the industrial revolution (abundant textiles and clothes) and the early to mid 1900s (factories), labour receding from sunrise to sundown changing to a working week with days off (various, but early 1900s official 5 day week[1] and 8 hour day), changing to the more recent thing where both parents have to work to get enough income while the child is away all day, massively increased free time (particularly household chore automation - electricity, light, central heating, food mixers, washing machines, mostly early to mid 1900s).
Compared to those things, the internet gets you something else to read or watch (instead of TV, newspaper, book, radio) and some other way to talk (instead of letter, telegram, postcard, telephone). Yes the organisation of things happens quicker and information comes from farther away, and can be more up to date, but you spend your time sitting in a chair watching or reading (office, home, school) like you did before, you buy things and have them delivered or go collect them (like you did before), you consult maps and directories and consumer advice and government documents (like you did before), you take and share holiday photos (like before). It's different, but it's not all that different.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zf22kmn (1932 in America)
[2] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN03... - the UK had 1.7M people working in farming in 1851, down to 182k today while the population has roughly 4x'd in the same time.
Not sure how much stock I put in that, though.
