Found myself in this thread and I started thinking about the nuance.
YT, Wiki, FB etc all existed before 2010, many of our staples even before 2005.
High speed home internet; 3G and 4G have been around fair amounts of time now.
You could play Kyocera Snake on the shitter or text on a Nokia brick when pay phones were still around.
Box, iCloud, and other SaaS and/or freemium storage solutions have been around a long time. Bluehost has been an option forever.
E-commerce has been killing big box stores since before the demise of the JCPenney catalog. Amazon shut down bookstores decades ago.
Zoom, FaceTime, etc, way before the pandemic.
I grew up in the analog world. I remember needing to make plans, print things, watch shows at certain times, yada yada… But the ability to reach in my pocket and pull out an untethered supercomputer most places I’ll ever be (including the fucking sky or under the earth) and to access the entire world’s library of historical knowledge, arts and culture in whichever ontology I prefer accurate in real time; have food, prescriptions, etc delivered same day; most consumer goods in 24 hrs; all my shit of all types synced all the time on all devices all the time; tell my house or phone or car what to do and a robot cleans my floor or whatever other crazy shit is happening with Home Assistant; you get the point…
Unfortunately, living in the US, I find myself defining temporal chapters by presidential terms these days. I know 2016 was when social media jumped the shark and broke the social contract IRL… 2008 was web 2.0 and we created the content, our digital lifestream, 2020 anyone with a MacBook could create chillhop for SoundCloud…
When did the web start looking like times square without ad blockers? When did our access and ability become so pervasive and encompassing? When did the dark web become more destructive than stranger danger?
When did we get here?
It’s a process, that’s like asking when did we get to the modern medicine, was it germ theory? Was it antibiotics? It’s a process, it’s hard to pinpoint the moment something becomes “modern”.
For me I think I would put it around 2013, that’s when I got my first Android phone, I had a Nokia n9 before, so not my first smartphone, but around that time as well data on mobile became more accessible to me. With the N9 I would use the wireless on most places and my data just to check emails or something, but around 2013 I started to use data more and more on the phone itself, and started to think with the always on mentality that I think it’s a staple of what you’re describing.
By 2013 I also had social media, watched YouTube, and video calls had become more common place (even though video calls were a thing long before then it wasn’t that common, not everyone had a webcam).
That being said some friends of mine got into that bandwagon way earlier, I remember a friend being a huge Android advocate back in 2010, he was always online even before I got my first touch screen phone (I even remember being concerned about the lack of physical buttons). While other friend got her first smartphone in 2014, and the always on mentality didn’t came until much later for her, possibly only by 2016 or so (she used to complain that I checked in on Foursquare to get free things). So it’s a process, and possibly it happened at different times for different people, but I think it’s fair to say that it wasn’t very common before 2010 and it was almost ubiquitous in 2018.
Note: I lived in Brazil during that time, I also saw a shift in the delay we got new technologies, before it took months or years to get new stuff, bit later you could get the latest phone on any store. Again, this was a process so it’s hard to tell you when it happened, but definitely Brazil from 2000s was a lot more delayed in getting new technologies than Brazil in the 2010s