The problem with Shadowrun's depiction of AR is the nature of the medium—words and still pictures, But people couldn't have functionally changed that much and anyone who talks about about social/cultural evolution accelerating from decades to years is a huckster selling horseshit, and the reality is that in Shadowrun the average person is functionally illiterate except as being iconographic literate (As an aside, the dominance of Japanese for decades would further instill the important of pictographic communications over the relatively simplistic Latin alphabet).