People were different 100 years ago. I had this conversation with a work colleage from Zimbabwe who spent the first half of his life in the African bush without the use of electricity in any form what so ever. He talked about the transition to the western style of living with the use of electricity with all this entailed and he laughed at the idea of westerners having to possibly deal with a reverse transition to a lifestyle without electricity in an emergency stating that this would be 'impossible'.

Take away the western forms of communication such as cell phones, PSTN phones, broadband internet, dial-up internet, broadcast media like the TV and radio and electricity in general and I'm afraid I would have to agree that folks today on the whole wouldn't be unable to make that transition to those same people 100 years ago.

Even the small example of the Digital TV switchover, which will occour in 179 days, 8 hours, 5 minutes will create a certain amount of a hullabaloo.