To tide you over until I get around to writing some fancy background stuff, here's a quick-fire list of what sort of thing you can expect in the world of Screaming Twenties.
The information here pertains mainly to this campaign setting: 2019 London. Some details differ throughout the game world.
I seem to have gotten carried away with politics now. Please bear with me for some technology and popular culture information which will come later.
In general: For the most part, available technology is much as it was thirteen years ago: few things are done now that weren't really possible then. What the last decade has seen is many of the predicted side-effects of the previous one becoming feasible as high-street products.
Transport:
The most common mode of personal transport is still the automobile. They now reliably drive themselves in all but the most taxing of conditions, although in the UK a vehicle moving on public roads must still be supervised by a licensed driver. A number of people have been convicted of Dangerous Driving after being found not to have been properly supervising their vehicle immediately prior to an accident. In remote areas, some roads are considered unsafe for automated driving, generally because the lines aren't repainted often enough.
For domestic use, electric and ethanol vehicles have performance comparable to petrol ones; the rising cost of fossil fuels has made high-performance petrol vehicles something of a status symbol among the young corporate elite. Besides gradual progress in safety, performance and fuel efficiency, the main difference is the extent of in-car entertainment: most cars now have a complete suite of consumer electronics for each seat (apart from the 'supervisor's').
Electric power is also available for small aircraft, whose easier access to sunlight makes them quite cheap to run. Small helicopters are quite reasonable to own and run, although various taxes and the required qualifications tend to restrict them to businesses and some wealthy individuals. Fixed-wing aircraft are cheaper, but the inconvenience of airfields has made them less popular.
One thing that does still require fossil fuels is the jet engine. The largest and fastest aircraft, as well as all vectored thrust vehicles, are very expensive to run, and hence quite unusual. For VTOL scenarios, tiltrotor aircraft provide a cost-effective alternative to VTs.
Trains are faster and more reliable than ever, although the quality of track in the UK still leaves a lot to be desired. The London Underground continues to run, those annoying anti-suicide barriers having by now been fitted in all stations and well-maintained trains and track making the system very reliable.
Slow shipping by huge tanker remains common, and smaller water-borne vessels have seen many of the same improvements as land vehicles.
Human Augmentation:
The term 'human augmentation' is used to refer to biological and genetic manipulations as well as high-performance prosthetics and other technologies intended to permanently alter the human body for better performance. Although almost any alteration is now legal, that legislation was a careful balance between protecting the consumer and protecting the manufacturer, and many are put off by the disclaimers a patient must sign.
Various treatments are available to increase pure physical performance: muscle & bone strengthening, reflex enhancements and so on. These are not as common as one might think (at least among normal, law-abiding citizens); they are absolutely illegal in traditional sports, and a new range of so-called cybersports are mired in conflicts of regulation as they try and establish rules that avoid their competitions devolving into corporate spend-offs.
The mental improvements are less well developed but more sought-after. An implanted microcomputer is a popular choice (see Direct Neural Interface, below), but direct improvements to mental and social faculties are limited to expensive and/or experimental biochemical and biogenetic therapies.
Outright replacement of perfectly good body parts is frowned on in most circles, especially since the benefit is usually purely physical. Artificial skin is good enough to make prosthetics virtually undetectable to the unaided eye, although some youth cultures see a raw metal arm as a daring fashion statement.
Improved senses, especially eyes, are surprisingly common (although still very unusual, across the populace). A replacement eye may have - depending on the patient's requirements - active aperture control, sensitivity to non-visible light (IR and/or UV), or even a camera. Heads-up display for a visual feed (from an internal computer or DNI (below) is almost standard.
Direct Neural Interface: The Holy Grail of cybernetics is a workable universal neural interface, and it isn't quite here yet. Current neural interfaces consist of an implanted network connection (wireless generally, although some prefer wires) and a 'thought recognition' processor to turn the operator's thoughts into digital instructions.
The thought recognition is comparable to late twentieth century speech recognition: a properly 'trained' interface can read the thoughts with a very high accuracy, although giving the device instructions effectively requires quite a lot of practice on the part of the user, both to frame the impulses in a coherent way and to be able to continue other surface thoughts without the interface trying to interpret them.
A practiced user can control a computer by DNI significantly faster than with a traditional keyboard/mouse arrangement, and dictation by thought recognition is much faster than by speech recognition. Other scenarios show less improvement. Vehicular controls tend to be sufficiently slow that the improvement in response time from the operator makes little or no difference, and the interface programs currently make it as difficult to learn to control the vehicle by DNI as manually, if not harder. A DNI is normally combined with a full implanted microcomputer, to add extra functionality to the link.
Direct neural interfaces are common among those who work with computers in a technical capacity, but unusual otherwise. Certainly they are not expected of anyone (in the UK it is illegal to require an employee to accept alterations, or to discriminate against applicants for a job on the basis of their augmentation or lack thereof, and on the face of it most employers have taken this to heart).
Health Implications: The long-term effects of human improvement technologies are largely unknown. There are many recorded cases of patients having adverse psychological reactions to augmentations, but this not expected to be a physical result of the alteration. Most people are unsure of the improvements, unhappy with the idea of having such invasive alteration and with the lack of reassurance from the research into the matter.
Computers:
Computers have continued to get more powerful, but perhaps more importantly more widespread. Embedded microcomputers are everywhere, to the extent that the typical consumer takes them for granted and nobody spares them much thought (while they work). Most of them have little or no human interaction, but those that do (the refrigerator that reorders when its inventory is low [and helps manage diets by withholding food], the fact that practically anything with a screen has internet access, and so on) are a defining feature of modern life.
Full-function computers are becoming less common in homes, their useful abilities often being replicated in less complicated multi-function devices. In businesses computers are small desktop units that are more powerful than ever running software that takes more resources than ever, for little overall change since the turn of the century.
Wireless networks are everywhere; a recent survey of the capital estimated that around 99.8% of Inner London was within gigabit WiFi coverage, and new billing models from ISPs make it easy to get internet access through any of it. Properly implemented wireless security is very difficult to get through, but the ease of establishing a network and the relative difficulty of securing it properly mean that tens of thousands of devices are more or less waiting for someone to break in.
The internet itself hasn't changed much. Various communications protocols have moved on a generation or two, but there have been few real new developments. The quality of web content continues to improve and the use of remote login protocols has almost peaked, but the promised age of virtual realities filled with geometric shapes hasn't materialised.
Miscellaneous Innovations:
ClearGlassTM presents no reflections: it is so transparent as to be essentially invisible. It is available for all manner of styles and purposes, although the bullet-resistant version is not quite as clear as the regular grade.
Holotubes: A laser array shines into a sealed glass chamber containing a mix of inert gases, where it has the abilitiy to project points of light into three-dimensional space. The full effect is a full image in 3D throughout the chamber. The output is from a digital feed, and can be anything that will fit in the chamber. Some problems still exist with opacity (since the projection is generally translucent, you can normally see the far side of the projected body, looking through the near side) but careful choice of nearby lighting will almost cover this, and reduce the 'glow' associated with an active video display. The units are common as part of entertainment systems, and also in shop windows and other places where they can be used for demonstration purposes.
More later, maybe. What more do people want to know about on the technology front?