Only tangentially related if that, but I re-read Neuromancer recently and realized with some sadness that its very evocative opening line [1] will quite quickly cease to have meaning for generations who grew up without analog TVs. We tend to think of literature as timeless, but there's a very real, if small, slice of it washed out by the tide of shifting metaphors.
[1] "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"
I've heard it observed before that current generations will assume this meant that the sky was blue, or perhaps black, that being what many televisions display when 'tuned' to an inactive input.
Before i got to your comment, reading the grandparent about this being a 1980s future immediately put me in mind of something else William Gibson said in ~1993:
"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed"
I like to think they'd envision a big blue box stretched across the sky, with the words "This channel only available to premium subscribers." If nothing else, it'd capture the cyberpunk aesthetic nicely.
> realized with some sadness that its very evocative opening line [1] will quite quickly cease to have meaning for generations who grew up without analog TVs
Meh, I don't think this is really a worry. We still read Shakespeare - we just have to make an extra effort to understand the nuances. In fact, that's part of what makes it so interesting.
[1] "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"