We have the luxury/advantage of knowing how things work from bottom up, starting from semiconductor physics and logic gates to web server and browser architecture, but an important thing for us, grownups, is to never stop getting excited with new stuff.
Well, true, but there's no technical reason that all this Web 2.0 social networking stuff couldn't have existed in 1997. Endless variations on the theme of "generate some HTML from a database" are just not significant in the wider sense.
There's no technical reason that printing couldn't have existed 2000 years ago. (Ok, it did exist in China but not in Europe anyway.) Apart from technologies there's also social demand and historical necessity. I don't think Flickr and YouTube would've been appreciated and would've challanged traditional media in 1997.
We have the luxury/advantage of knowing how things work from bottom up, starting from semiconductor physics and logic gates to web server and browser architecture, but an important thing for us, grownups, is to never stop getting excited with new stuff.