Another thought: People allegedly overestimate near-term changes and underestimate future changes. This could also be explained if, as suggested above, people tend to visualize a single change of the same magnitude as the largest change they remember experiencing. Over the next five years we are not likely to see the next Internet-sized change. Over the next twenty years, we are likely to see more total change than that, even if it does not stem from a single source.

On the topic of reversing changes to appreciate their absurdity: movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien to me than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes. Watch a movie from 1950 and see how long it takes for them to show a man slapping a woman. Doesn't happen a lot in Lord of the Rings, does it?