I think despite having lived through it, it's easy to miss just how transformative smartphones and social media have been to human society.

There's been an absolute explosion in communication. In the early years of the internet it was pretty exciting and novel to be able to talk to people from other countries. Now it's completely unremarkable.

All this of course has a huge effect on how language develops and is used, and really we're still in the early years of it all (I guess The Smartphone Era starts around 2010 or so).