The point is entirely that there are other dimensions by which to measure cultural change, in addition to "linking the world" and "globalization."
I can assure you that most people now do not consider indoor plumbing, washing machines, and dish washers as big things.. but then consider what happens when there's no power or water for a week. While people have internet access through their phones, and can make business deals to the other side of the world, they can't operate the various home appliances which made life feel normal. These are the things which used to be done by servants and women of the household, back before there was home electricity.
this intrigues me. while the widespread use of JSON as JSON is perhaps what differentiates it from what i'm about to describe i propose that the concept is an inevitable or obvious means of data representation/manipulation. As an arguably irrelevant anecdote to support this proposition I submit that prior to my personal introduction to the existence of JSON I was organizing data in strings and in txt files in a format nearly identical to basic JSON and writing simple functions to essentially do the same thing. I submit that I am not special or particularly clever and therefore the baller-coders that cometh before me certainly had to have their own types of crap like this. If i didn't have a tablet in class i probably would have had their names in my notes, but i digress.
tl;dr - While the advent of JSON's incarnation and that of C are several decades apart the underlying concepts are not.
tl;dr;dr - just realized your second sentence kinda says this.
I find it very difficult to swallow anything written by the OP from the obstructed view at Adobe. After spending nearly every billable hour for more than three years buried in AS3's woeful inconsistencies, undocumented (or un-addressed) compiler issues, seemingly infinite application-crippling bugs, schizophrenic deprecation- any dev who had the misfortune of being relegated to work primarily in AS3 (and god help you if you had to support AS2 and AS3 applications simultaneously) the mere suggestion that Adobe has an opinion that is anything but a head up its own ass probably makes you break out in hives like i just did.
