Technology of Sleepless in Seattle

I've lived here now for almost five years, and traveled here and considered living here for more than twenty years, but I finally saw this movie for the first time last night.  I found myself getting emotional -- no, not over the sappy chick flick parts -- but over the technology in the movie and how much has changed, just in the 15 years since the movie was released.   I don't think of this as an "old" movie, yet look at all the technologies we take for granted today, but that weren't used in Sleepless in Seattle:

• Cordless phones:  all characters make/receive calls on those old-fashioned wired handsets with a cord hanging to the wall. 
• Mobile phones: when the boy interrupts his father's date, he calls the restaurant, because nobody has cell phones.
• Internet: the Meg Ryan character uses Lexus/Nexus to find information about Tom Hanks--technology she has access to only because she's affiliated with a major newspaper.
• Starbucks: the characters kick back at beer pubs, because the idea of grabbing a latte together just wouldn't have been possible.
• Flight reservations: the boy gets a plane ticket to NYC through a friend whose mom happens to be a travel agent and that's pretty much the only way to book a flight.
• VHS tapes:  The characters watch segments of a Cary Grant film on VHS.
• Windows PC:  few computers are shown in the movie (because of course not many people had them), but even the few that are shown are old clunkers running DOS.
• Email: what's that?  everyone sends postal mail to the Tom Hanks character because what else would they send?
• Cable TV: the boy explains that he knows about adult behaviors because his friend "has cable".
• Car radios:  The Meg Ryan character switches between stations with those push-button click things, not the digital "scan" or "seek" features on every car today.

This movie is not that old, but each of these technologies seems ancient now, and we can't remember living without them.  (the Internet?  cell phones? PCs?)  Still, if you think fifteen years is a long time (some of you weren't even born then), what about technologies from just the last five years since I moved to Seattle?  There aren't as many, of course, but I can still see the technology changing before our eyes:

• GPS: Meg Ryan fumbles with paper maps as she tries to find her way around Seattle.
• Blackberry: It was pretty uncommon, even five years ago, to get your email while on the run.
• Tivo:  some people had it, but it wasn't nearly common enough that the writes could have expected everyone to understand the idea of time-shifting your TV.
• Digital cameras:  Again, they had started to appear but you still had lots of people using film.

But the biggest technological changes of the past five years would require fundamental rewrites of the plot.  You literally wouldn't make a movie like Sleepless in Seattle anymore because the entire premise simply makes less sense in a world dominated by internet match-making and ubiquitous communications. Here are some new technologies, just from the past five years, that would almost certainly be included in a 2008 remake of Sleepless in Seattle:

• Facebook, Twitter, and other real-time social networking
• Blogs, Wikipedia -- user-generated content.
• webcams

These newer technologies are clearly becoming mainstream, and in a few years we'll wonder how we lived without them.  The exciting thing, to me, is to imagine the world of ten or fifteen years from now.  The movies you watch in 2008 will seem just as antiquated in 2018 or 2023.