We notice what varies more than we notice what's important

Excellent stuff.

As the theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Antifragile, “we notice what varies and changes more than what plays a larger role but doesn’t change. We rely more on water than on cell phones, but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do.”

The relative nature of our unconscious comparisons strikes again. We don't judge things by their absolute importance, we judge them by their variation relative to what we're used to. We don't go around in a continual state of ecstasy because we've got oxygen : the only times we appreciate oxygen are when it's under threat. Default comparisons are always relative, recent, and local.

Edgerton notes that the “innovation-centric” worldview—those sexy devices that “changed the world”—runs not merely to the future, but also the past. “The horse,” he writes, “made a greater contribution to Nazi conquest than the V2.” We noticed what was invented more than what was actually used.

We tend to imagine we are living in a world that could scarcely have been imagined a few decades ago. It is not uncommon to read assertions like: “Someone would have been unable at the beginning of the 20th century to even dream of what transportation would look like a half a century later.” And yet zeppelins were flying in 1900; a year before, in New York City, the first pedestrian had already been killed by an automobile. Was the notion of air travel, or the thought that the car was going to change life on the street, really so beyond envisioning—or is it merely the chauvinism of the present, peering with faint condescension at our hopelessly primitive predecessors?

“When we think of information technology we forget about postal systems, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and television,” writes Edgerton. “When we celebrate on-line shopping, the mail order catalogue goes missing.”... We expect more change than actually happens in the future because we imagine our lives have changed more than they actually have.

While the technological past and future appear to be more different than they actually are, cultural differences in time seem surprising. Working as historical consultant on the video game Assassin’s Creed, Flanders had to constantly remind writers to cut the word “cheers” from the script, because, she told me, “people didn’t use that word until the 20th century.” The writers wanted to know what they did say. “They had huge trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that mostly people didn’t say anything. Giving some form of salutation before you drink is so normal to them, it’s actually hard to accept that for centuries people didn’t feel the need.”

The historian Lawrence Samuel has called social progress the “Achilles heel” of futurism. He argues that people forget the injunction of the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee: Ideas, not technology, have driven the biggest historical changes. When technology changes people, it is often not in the ways one might expect: Mobile technology, for example, did not augur the “death of distance,” but actually strengthened the power of urbanism. The washing machine freed women from labour, and could have sparked a revolution in gender roles and relations. Instead the women simply assumed the jobs once held by their servants.

Why is cultural change so hard to predict? For one, we have long tended to forget that it does change. Status quo bias reigns. “Until recently, culture explained why things stayed the same, not why they changed,” notes the sociologist Kieran Healy. “Understood as a monolithic block of passively internalized norms transmitted by socialization and canonized by tradition, culture was normally seen as inhibiting individuals.”

I suppose part of that might be that culture shifts (as the article then says) first in small ways, gradually, so that everything always seems normal. The big shifts, like technological marvels, do get noticed and recorded. But the small ones (like not saying cheers) don't - who would ever record such a thing ? It changes nothing much in daily life, whereas inventing a smartphone is a clear, obvious change. Similarly, we once used to sleep quite differently :
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot-rp