One of the common themes that was immediately obvious when looking through the websites of my peers and then of students from 2004, was how little of the media of 2004 students was internet based compared to today's students. Music is a good example of this. Students from 2004 listened to radio/CDs with the occasional iPod user. Music today is dominated by streaming, a sharp difference from the pre-downloaded nature of the music on an iPod or CD. Today's music technology also represents greater in-moment choice and reflects the cheapness of data streaming that allows that type of flexibility.
A noticeable similarity between past and present students was the prominence of web-based instant-messaging. While no one calls social media direct messages (DMs) "instant messages" anymore, most social media platforms have some form of DM system. The biggest difference here is that most DMing now occurs as part of a larger platform instead of a stand-alone service.
Another big similarity is that people still like and watch TV! While this isn't that surprising, one of the least changed trends (watching TV shows and series) is a great example of the changing media landscape. Everyone still watches TV, but now, most people watch their favorite shows on a streaming service like Netflix and Hulu. Even some of the shows are the same (Family Guy, etc.), but the platform that is used is different.
A form of media that I gave zero thought to when compiling my own list, but showed up on a few students pages from 2004, was magazines. This was interesting to me because magazines represent an interesting "tweener" type of media, where it is designed to be short and consumable, which is in direct competition with the Twitter and Facebook's of the world now, but also slightly more in depth, which is in competition with online news sources like nytimes.com or cnn.com. I wouldn't be surprised if, for most people, magazines offer little value anymore and it's why they've fallen off of most peoples' list.
A surprising observation was the prevalence of landlines (landlines are mentioned on exactly zero of my peers' pages), and the relative rarity of cell phones. Only about half of the students mentioned having cell phones and almost none of them even mentioned texting or messaging. This is a huge difference between what occurs now, where cell-phones are much more commonly used as messgaing devices than calling devices.
Finally, most media that is listed by both my peers and by students who compiled their lists 15 years ago, whether it is music, video streaming, DMing, or texting, is now all accessible through phones. This is a point who's significance is hard to quantify, but may help explain the universal parental complaint of kids being on their phones so much. It also has interesting implications for personal privacy and agency on the internet, an issue that has been the subject of much political attention lately.