The 2000's will be remembered as the first decade when physical reality became a "tab" on people's subjective experience.
It's the first time in history when a family could all be sitting together in a family room, all "watching" TV—but each person also has a laptop and is simultaneously (1) talking to their friends on G-chat, (2) make poast on message board, (3) listening to iTunes, and (4) reading a blog/facebook/etc.
When someone in the family says something in real life, hearing it and reacting to it is simply (5).
Also: the way we have conversations has permanently changed, with IM's becoming omnipresent and intertwined with e-mails. You can have three conversations at once now. You can put someone you're having a conversation with on hold for a few minutes without any breach of etiquette (like on a telephone). There has been nothing like this in history.
The 2000's has taken multitasking to a whole new level.
The important things that happened in technology had their roots in the 90s and won't come to complete fruition until the next decade, at least. It started out with a bang - the 21st century has arrived! - and then sort of fizzled.
For that I'd have to disagree
Over 8 years we've had a boom in technology and progress unlike anything seen before.
For computers its been the miniaturization of space with the maximization of computer ability and storage
Take the typical hard drive in 2000 which had around 20-40gb of space. Today we're breaking 1 terabyte and not stopping
Another great example I always like to refer to is the iPod. If you hold one of those first generation iPods in your hand, those bricks with their tiny black and white screens, you would never imagine that in 8 years that would evolve into the iPod Touch, shuffle, and nano variants.
LCD screens as well have come into their own, now with equal or better response times and bumping up to higher and higher resolutions, with graphics processing booming right along side it
And that's omitting some of the bigger technological breakthroughs like the Large Hadron Collider and vastly improved fuel efficiency in cars (You can throw hybrids in there as well, but they're still coming into their own)
And all that is omitting the internet itself, which has progressed so rapidly it's mind-numbing
For that I'd have to disagree
Over 8 years we've had a boom in technology and progress unlike anything seen before.
For computers its been the miniaturization of space with the maximization of computer ability and storage
Take the typical hard drive in 2000 which had around 20-40gb of space. Today we're breaking 1 terabyte and not stopping
Another great example I always like to refer to is the iPod. If you hold one of those first generation iPods in your hand, those bricks with their tiny black and white screens, you would never imagine that in 8 years that would evolve into the iPod Touch, shuffle, and nano variants.
And that's omitting some of the bigger technological breakthroughs like the Large Hadron Collider and vastly improved fuel efficiency in cars (You can throw hybrids in there as well, but they're still coming into their own)
I'll grant you the iPod and the greater acceptance of the Internet, but I still think this decade is going to be seen as a bridge decade. The LHC is neat, but it's late in the decade, currently out of commission for months and probably won't have an impact until the next year or two, meaning that it'll be identified more with the next decade than this one.
When it comes to technology, I think the 00s will be seen as a bridge decade. We had bigger hard drives, but hard drives come were around in the 90s and will be even bigger in the 10s. All of these technologies were invented earlier and are still in their infancy to the point that their ultimate form and major advances are still in the future.
For that I'd have to disagree
Over 8 years we've had a boom in technology and progress unlike anything seen before.
For computers its been the miniaturization of space with the maximization of computer ability and storage
Take the typical hard drive in 2000 which had around 20-40gb of space. Today we're breaking 1 terabyte and not stopping
Another great example I always like to refer to is the iPod. If you hold one of those first generation iPods in your hand, those bricks with their tiny black and white screens, you would never imagine that in 8 years that would evolve into the iPod Touch, shuffle, and nano variants.
And that's omitting some of the bigger technological breakthroughs like the Large Hadron Collider and vastly improved fuel efficiency in cars (You can throw hybrids in there as well, but they're still coming into their own)
I'll grant you the iPod and the greater acceptance of the Internet, but I still think this decade is going to be seen as a bridge decade. The LHC is neat, but it's late in the decade, currently out of commission for months and probably won't have an impact until the next year or two, meaning that it'll be identified more with the next decade than this one.
When it comes to technology, I think the 00s will be seen as a bridge decade. We had bigger hard drives, but hard drives come were around in the 90s and will be even bigger in the 10s. All of these technologies were invented earlier and are still in their infancy to the point that their ultimate form and major advances are still in the future.
By that logic all eras are bridge era. What are 00s bridging to?
By that logic all eras are bridge era. What are 00s bridging to?
It's the teething period between invention to ultimate fruition. I have a strong suspicion that a lot of the social networking, technological convergence and efficiency are really going to come into their own in the next decade. Time will tell, but I doubt that any of those transformations will be seen as particularly 00s things in the future.
After all, we're not talking about sober historical assessments. We're talking about how the popular culture will view the decade. Lots of important things happened in the 80s, but we mostly remember big hair, VHS and bad movies.
By that logic all eras are bridge era. What are 00s bridging to?
It's the teething period between invention to ultimate fruition. I have a strong suspicion that a lot of the social networking, technological convergence and efficiency are really going to come into their own in the next decade. Time will tell, but I doubt that any of those transformations will be seen as particularly 00s things in the future.
After all, we're not talking about sober historical assessments. We're talking about how the popular culture will view the decade. Lots of important things happened in the 80s, but we mostly remember big hair, VHS and bad movies.
i dont know how much more social networking can grow...facebook is at least a great communicative tool that helps you stay in touch with people you may not have been able to. but stuff like myspace is too insular-bubble-ish to maintain an audience that will keep coming back. It seems like the most dedicated myspace members who stay longer than a couple years of high school are amateur bands trying to get their name out there.
I think YouTube is going to be mocked pretty relentlessly in the future, much in the same way it's easy to mock those gigantic fifteen pound cell phones from the early 90s.
I mean, it's an emerging technology, but hopefully we advance to the point where we can look back and laugh at the hilariously grainy and tiny videos and the awful setup of that website.
i dont know how much more social networking can grow...facebook is at least a great communicative tool that helps you stay in touch with people you may not have been able to. but stuff like myspace is too insular-bubble-ish to maintain an audience that will keep coming back. It seems like the most dedicated myspace members who stay longer than a couple years of high school are amateur bands trying to get their name out there.
I suspect the future of social networking is going to move toward a more open-source model. One where your profile is more like your phone number, identified with you and not any particular company. Ironically, MySpace seems to be embracing this model before Facebook.
I do think YouTube will be seen as a 00ies thing. The more I think about it, the more I realize that we tend to identify decades by things that are discrete to them. We think of grunge, the Chronic and world-music fusions as 90s things primarily because music doesn't sound like that anymore.
Bug eye sun glasses and turn of the century minimalism (have you been into an Apple store?)
Yeah, what's up with those sunglasses? Women seem intent on accessorizing with the biggest things possible. I'm putting my money on future sketch comedy shows having '00 women with large everything and then a teeny cell phone.
I just don't see how you follow up a decade where the hip culture is defined by its cynical look at the world. Everything is "irony" and "postmodernism." If you spend the whole time decrying everything as a farce, where do you go from there?
I hope in a couple years we can see a new movement in sincerity. A kind of "Yeah, the world sucks, but let's be awesome anyway" instead of "the world sucks, lets protest through inactivity and cynical blogs."
The internet will in hindsight be something of the '00's. It has absolutely exploded. At the start of the decade, only the tiniest fraction of what we have now was there, and only a fraction of people were using it. Now, living without the internet is nearly unthinkable. My 83 year old grandfather does his banking online.
It will also be the era of cellphones. Again, these existed in '90's and maybe even early '80's, but I remember getting my Nokia 3210 around 1998 and being hip and cool and a relative early adopter. Now my 11 year old cousin has one, as again do all my grandparents. Not to mention how they have progressed technically, if I went back 10 years in time with my Samsung Omnia, with it's touch screen, video player, desktop and digital camera, people would be stunned.
Digital Camera's itself are a thing of this era as well.
On a political front, for all that we have been through, it seems somewhat tame, with center-rightwing conservatives in power in many key countries, and not changing much, and I doubt it will be talked about much, apart from the folly of the Iraq war, electing a black president in the USA, and the 9/11 attacks. The current economic crisis will just be one in a series of crises. There have been no truely grand events really, on the scale of world wars, fall of major countries etcet.
On an economic scale, it's about the rise of China and India as the worlds major production centra. How that story ends is unknown (I am skeptic, both countries have a lot of corruption and government problems that I think will prevent them from ever becoming true powerhouses, the same thing stifling Russia).
Biotech has started to seep into our lives. Genetically modified food, the progress on DNA research, the ease with which we can do such things now.
Fashionwise, it hasn't been a horrible decade. The bug-eye sunglasses stand out mostly, as do the ridicilously large handbags.
I thought most people were agreed that the 2000s are called the Noughties.
I like that.
Other things that this decade might be remembered for might be Blue Ray vs HD-DVD (Betamax vs VHS 2?), the advent of downloadable content, and a general lack of homogeneity in terms of both music and clothing preferences. It seems that nowadays you can't even go a month without some new variation on sub-genres (who are totally not anything even remotely like that last sub-genre over there) that I somehow hear about.
A lot of the things I was going to suggest have already been posted. YouTube, social networking, reality TV. Nothing stays popular forever, and i'm pretty sure reality TV is going to be remembered as this decade's biggest fad. At least I hope its just a fad. Dear god please let it be just a fad.
We'll remember the Wii, and laugh at it's shitty waggle "motion sensing" when we're all playing lightsaber games with haptic force-feedback controllers and mind-reading headsets or some shit like that.
We'll remember the birth of downloadable content for consoles, as it slowly shifts from "another way to get games" to "the only way to get games".
... I was sure I had more than that. Eh.
*edit*
Oh yeah, emos. Fuck emos. We'll remember the 00's as an era full of Wii-playing reality-TV-watching Facebook-using emos. That is all.
Don't look at the oughties with oughties eyes. Imagine how future generations will see.
As more of our natural world is destroyed and big poplation centers look more alike, the world 10 years from now will be a lot less interesting to people than our world is to us.
The ongoing trend of 24/7 immersion in media will only grow further. It's not unlikely that for many people history will become an obsession, just as reality tv was for us. And the oughties is the most recorded and acessible decade to date. There's a lot of history to choose from.
Except millions of people to discover internet memes, or the dating life of Britney Spears's third boyfriend, or the politics of skateboarding cliques in south Boston. They will have enough acces to detailed information to avoid the generalisations we grew up with. One person's idea of the oughties need only correspond to that of a handful of people around them, and no-one else on the planet.
Don't look at the oughties with oughties eyes. Imagine how future generations will see.
As more of our natural world is destroyed and big poplation centers look more alike, the world 10 years from now will be a lot less interesting to people than our world is to us.
The ongoing trend of 24/7 immersion in media will only grow further. It's not unlikely that for many people history will become an obsession, just as reality tv was for us. And the oughties is the most recorded and acessible decade to date. There's a lot of history to choose from.
Except millions of people to discover internet memes, or the dating life of Britney Spears's third boyfriend, or the politics of skateboarding cliques in south Boston. They will have enough acces to detailed information to avoid the generalisations we grew up with. One person's idea of the oughties need only correspond to that of a handful of people around them, and no-one else on the planet.
This generation and the upcoming one are already turning the TV off and switching to the interbutts for media in droves. I don't think the 24/7 networks will persist in their current form for much longer.
The 00s are all about transitioning away from old media and on to the internet, and that's how it will be seen. The 90s started it, the 00s cemented it, and the 10s and 20s will likely determine how we ultimately interact through these mediums.
I just don't see how you follow up a decade where the hip culture is defined by its cynical look at the world. Everything is "irony" and "postmodernism." If you spend the whole time decrying everything as a farce, where do you go from there?
I hope in a couple years we can see a new movement in sincerity. A kind of "Yeah, the world sucks, but let's be awesome anyway" instead of "the world sucks, lets protest through inactivity and cynical blogs."
"Hey guys, instead of putting all this thought into fucking t shirts I'm going to just put on this one and go out and do shit."
I just don't see how you follow up a decade where the hip culture is defined by its cynical look at the world. Everything is "irony" and "postmodernism." If you spend the whole time decrying everything as a farce, where do you go from there?
I hope in a couple years we can see a new movement in sincerity. A kind of "Yeah, the world sucks, but let's be awesome anyway" instead of "the world sucks, lets protest through inactivity and cynical blogs."
"Hey guys, instead of putting all this thought into fucking t shirts I'm going to just put on this one and go out and do shit."
I just don't see how you follow up a decade where the hip culture is defined by its cynical look at the world. Everything is "irony" and "postmodernism." If you spend the whole time decrying everything as a farce, where do you go from there?
I hope in a couple years we can see a new movement in sincerity. A kind of "Yeah, the world sucks, but let's be awesome anyway" instead of "the world sucks, lets protest through inactivity and cynical blogs."
"Hey guys, instead of putting all this thought into fucking t shirts I'm going to just put on this one and go out and do shit."
"Hey Mike, did you see the t shirt he picked?"
"Pretty cool man."
"Let's imitate him and just grab at random now!"
And thus the cycle begins anew.
And I disagree with the fact that this decade has been all about irony and not caring, if anything what we have seen is the angry organizations which used to lead advocacy for rights in the past fail to connect with the upcoming generation. We do care, we just don't appreciate the rage and angry riots that they thought served the movement so well. It has been a decade of quiet protest and organization by the majority of our generation, while previous generations have groaned and moaned that we don't care, when in fact all it demonstrates is that we have seen that you can't get anything done if you in a blind rage about it.
I mean, we elected Barack Obama president. And I'm glad to say many of our generation who voted for him didn't even think it was of any relevance what color his skin was. I'd like to hope we can be remembered for that, for the walls we broke down by simply declaring them irrelevant to us, and for the beginnings of the organization of the online community to real world action. In the future people will no longer scoff at 100000 signature online petitions (well, they will at ones about video games and facebook layouts), since we have shown we have the beginnings of the ability to organize ourselves.
I just don't see how you follow up a decade where the hip culture is defined by its cynical look at the world. Everything is "irony" and "postmodernism." If you spend the whole time decrying everything as a farce, where do you go from there?
I hope in a couple years we can see a new movement in sincerity. A kind of "Yeah, the world sucks, but let's be awesome anyway" instead of "the world sucks, lets protest through inactivity and cynical blogs."
"Hey guys, instead of putting all this thought into fucking t shirts I'm going to just put on this one and go out and do shit."
"Hey Mike, did you see the t shirt he picked?"
"Pretty cool man."
"Let's imitate him and just grab at random now!"
And thus the cycle begins anew.
I have a dream.
And honestly if you truly believe in the 60s and 70s people weren't going "Hey man, which floppy cap should I wear to the anti consumerism rally on Shattuck? I gonna wear these tight stripey jeans I bought yesterday, but which hat??" then you are being a little bit naive
And I disagree with the fact that this decade has been all about irony and not caring, if anything what we have seen is the angry organizations which used to lead advocacy for rights in the past fail to connect with the upcoming generation. We do care, we just don't appreciate the rage and angry riots that they thought served the movement so well. It has been a decade of quiet protest and organization by the majority of our generation, while previous generations have groaned and moaned that we don't care, when in fact all it demonstrates is that we have seen that you can't get anything done if you in a blind rage about it.
I mean, we elected Barack Obama president. And I'm glad to say many of our generation who voted for him didn't even think it was of any relevance what color his skin was. I'd like to hope we can be remembered for that, for the walls we broke down by simply declaring them irrelevant to us, and for the beginnings of the organization of the online community to real world action. In the future people will no longer scoff at 100000 signature online petitions (well, they will at ones about video games and facebook layouts), since we have shown we have the beginnings of the ability to organize ourselves.
I think Obama's victory is more of a side effect of fantastic PR than some amazing ability of the people to rally together for a cause. I mean, Prop 8 passed, so it's like "fuck. really?"
Bug eye sun glasses and turn of the century minimalism (have you been into an Apple store?)
Yeah, what's up with those sunglasses? Women seem intent on accessorizing with the biggest things possible. I'm putting my money on future sketch comedy shows having '00 women with large everything and then a teeny cell phone.
Big handbags are awesome, okay? It lets me carry all sorts of furtive things, like food and drinks into movie theaters and yellowcake into classified tradeoff--
i have said too much!
(The teeny cell phones are dumb, though. Mine is well fit to my hand and that's good enough for me.)
How about the advent of bluetooth? People talking to midair and looking silly until you realize there is actually something in their ear.
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I think we've done a good job separating the turn of this century from the end of last century, technologically. Just like the industrial revolution started in the 19th century, but really peaked in the 20th, so has the information revolution.
As for how cheesy we'll look. Well, just go back and watch Darkwing Duck or early episodes of The X-Files and tell me if it's not a lot cheesier than you remember it. Reality TV will be looked at like we think of the old game show fad. Also, I'm sure history will record the ridiculous gas price fluctuations of the past 7 years. I'd like to put together a time capsule PC for the future, just so I can experience the cheesy nostalgia firsthand.
edit: on the subject of bluetooth, we'll probably be ridiculed for the terrible molded plastic and bright blue light
Not sure if it's my perspective but it seems like the 00s have brought about a great democratization of music. Late 80s and early 90s music was defined by MTV and the radio. Now the internet has taken over that role. it's made new music easiest to find and killed the music marketing machine
Clothing wise, I thing the late '00's are going to be represented by layered shirts and tights, which would look quite ridiculous, as even today's girls know not to wear both at the same to.
No, the late '00s will be remembered for skinny jeans *cringe*. Really, whose idea was that!?
That's more men's fashion, though.
As for emo, I don't think anybody's going to remember it as anything but a favored whipping boy, kind of like a hilarious Vietnam. We make way too much fun of it, and they never appear in current films, which is where many stereotypes come from.
If they ever show somebody watching TV during this decade, though, it'll be the Daily Show or Colbert Report, and they'll be reading Harry Potter.
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It's the first time in history when a family could all be sitting together in a family room, all "watching" TV—but each person also has a laptop and is simultaneously (1) talking to their friends on G-chat, (2) make poast on message board, (3) listening to iTunes, and (4) reading a blog/facebook/etc.
When someone in the family says something in real life, hearing it and reacting to it is simply (5).
Also: the way we have conversations has permanently changed, with IM's becoming omnipresent and intertwined with e-mails. You can have three conversations at once now. You can put someone you're having a conversation with on hold for a few minutes without any breach of etiquette (like on a telephone). There has been nothing like this in history.
The 2000's has taken multitasking to a whole new level.
Over 8 years we've had a boom in technology and progress unlike anything seen before.
For computers its been the miniaturization of space with the maximization of computer ability and storage
Take the typical hard drive in 2000 which had around 20-40gb of space. Today we're breaking 1 terabyte and not stopping
Another great example I always like to refer to is the iPod. If you hold one of those first generation iPods in your hand, those bricks with their tiny black and white screens, you would never imagine that in 8 years that would evolve into the iPod Touch, shuffle, and nano variants.
LCD screens as well have come into their own, now with equal or better response times and bumping up to higher and higher resolutions, with graphics processing booming right along side it
And that's omitting some of the bigger technological breakthroughs like the Large Hadron Collider and vastly improved fuel efficiency in cars (You can throw hybrids in there as well, but they're still coming into their own)
And all that is omitting the internet itself, which has progressed so rapidly it's mind-numbing
I'll grant you the iPod and the greater acceptance of the Internet, but I still think this decade is going to be seen as a bridge decade. The LHC is neat, but it's late in the decade, currently out of commission for months and probably won't have an impact until the next year or two, meaning that it'll be identified more with the next decade than this one.
When it comes to technology, I think the 00s will be seen as a bridge decade. We had bigger hard drives, but hard drives come were around in the 90s and will be even bigger in the 10s. All of these technologies were invented earlier and are still in their infancy to the point that their ultimate form and major advances are still in the future.
By that logic all eras are bridge era. What are 00s bridging to?
It's the teething period between invention to ultimate fruition. I have a strong suspicion that a lot of the social networking, technological convergence and efficiency are really going to come into their own in the next decade. Time will tell, but I doubt that any of those transformations will be seen as particularly 00s things in the future.
After all, we're not talking about sober historical assessments. We're talking about how the popular culture will view the decade. Lots of important things happened in the 80s, but we mostly remember big hair, VHS and bad movies.
i dont know how much more social networking can grow...facebook is at least a great communicative tool that helps you stay in touch with people you may not have been able to. but stuff like myspace is too insular-bubble-ish to maintain an audience that will keep coming back. It seems like the most dedicated myspace members who stay longer than a couple years of high school are amateur bands trying to get their name out there.
I mean, it's an emerging technology, but hopefully we advance to the point where we can look back and laugh at the hilariously grainy and tiny videos and the awful setup of that website.
I suspect the future of social networking is going to move toward a more open-source model. One where your profile is more like your phone number, identified with you and not any particular company. Ironically, MySpace seems to be embracing this model before Facebook.
I do think YouTube will be seen as a 00ies thing. The more I think about it, the more I realize that we tend to identify decades by things that are discrete to them. We think of grunge, the Chronic and world-music fusions as 90s things primarily because music doesn't sound like that anymore.
We'll probably be the reality TV decade.
If that's what we're remembered as thirty years from now, stop the world, cause I want off.
Yeah, what's up with those sunglasses? Women seem intent on accessorizing with the biggest things possible. I'm putting my money on future sketch comedy shows having '00 women with large everything and then a teeny cell phone.
I hope in a couple years we can see a new movement in sincerity. A kind of "Yeah, the world sucks, but let's be awesome anyway" instead of "the world sucks, lets protest through inactivity and cynical blogs."
It will also be the era of cellphones. Again, these existed in '90's and maybe even early '80's, but I remember getting my Nokia 3210 around 1998 and being hip and cool and a relative early adopter. Now my 11 year old cousin has one, as again do all my grandparents. Not to mention how they have progressed technically, if I went back 10 years in time with my Samsung Omnia, with it's touch screen, video player, desktop and digital camera, people would be stunned.
Digital Camera's itself are a thing of this era as well.
On a political front, for all that we have been through, it seems somewhat tame, with center-rightwing conservatives in power in many key countries, and not changing much, and I doubt it will be talked about much, apart from the folly of the Iraq war, electing a black president in the USA, and the 9/11 attacks. The current economic crisis will just be one in a series of crises. There have been no truely grand events really, on the scale of world wars, fall of major countries etcet.
On an economic scale, it's about the rise of China and India as the worlds major production centra. How that story ends is unknown (I am skeptic, both countries have a lot of corruption and government problems that I think will prevent them from ever becoming true powerhouses, the same thing stifling Russia).
Biotech has started to seep into our lives. Genetically modified food, the progress on DNA research, the ease with which we can do such things now.
Fashionwise, it hasn't been a horrible decade. The bug-eye sunglasses stand out mostly, as do the ridicilously large handbags.
I like that.
Other things that this decade might be remembered for might be Blue Ray vs HD-DVD (Betamax vs VHS 2?), the advent of downloadable content, and a general lack of homogeneity in terms of both music and clothing preferences. It seems that nowadays you can't even go a month without some new variation on sub-genres (who are totally not anything even remotely like that last sub-genre over there) that I somehow hear about.
thats a stupid name. they'll just refer to us as turn of the century
Done with periods, eh?
We'll remember the Wii, and laugh at it's shitty waggle "motion sensing" when we're all playing lightsaber games with haptic force-feedback controllers and mind-reading headsets or some shit like that.
We'll remember the birth of downloadable content for consoles, as it slowly shifts from "another way to get games" to "the only way to get games".
... I was sure I had more than that. Eh.
*edit*
Oh yeah, emos. Fuck emos. We'll remember the 00's as an era full of Wii-playing reality-TV-watching Facebook-using emos. That is all.
I love boxes.
GM: Rusty Chains (DH Ongoing)
I lost 2 brothers and 3 uncles in that war
As more of our natural world is destroyed and big poplation centers look more alike, the world 10 years from now will be a lot less interesting to people than our world is to us.
The ongoing trend of 24/7 immersion in media will only grow further. It's not unlikely that for many people history will become an obsession, just as reality tv was for us. And the oughties is the most recorded and acessible decade to date. There's a lot of history to choose from.
Except millions of people to discover internet memes, or the dating life of Britney Spears's third boyfriend, or the politics of skateboarding cliques in south Boston. They will have enough acces to detailed information to avoid the generalisations we grew up with. One person's idea of the oughties need only correspond to that of a handful of people around them, and no-one else on the planet.
This generation and the upcoming one are already turning the TV off and switching to the interbutts for media in droves. I don't think the 24/7 networks will persist in their current form for much longer.
"Hey Mike, did you see the t shirt he picked?"
"Pretty cool man."
"Let's imitate him and just grab at random now!"
And thus the cycle begins anew.
I have a dream.
And I disagree with the fact that this decade has been all about irony and not caring, if anything what we have seen is the angry organizations which used to lead advocacy for rights in the past fail to connect with the upcoming generation. We do care, we just don't appreciate the rage and angry riots that they thought served the movement so well. It has been a decade of quiet protest and organization by the majority of our generation, while previous generations have groaned and moaned that we don't care, when in fact all it demonstrates is that we have seen that you can't get anything done if you in a blind rage about it.
I mean, we elected Barack Obama president. And I'm glad to say many of our generation who voted for him didn't even think it was of any relevance what color his skin was. I'd like to hope we can be remembered for that, for the walls we broke down by simply declaring them irrelevant to us, and for the beginnings of the organization of the online community to real world action. In the future people will no longer scoff at 100000 signature online petitions (well, they will at ones about video games and facebook layouts), since we have shown we have the beginnings of the ability to organize ourselves.
And honestly if you truly believe in the 60s and 70s people weren't going "Hey man, which floppy cap should I wear to the anti consumerism rally on Shattuck? I gonna wear these tight stripey jeans I bought yesterday, but which hat??" then you are being a little bit naive
I think Obama's victory is more of a side effect of fantastic PR than some amazing ability of the people to rally together for a cause. I mean, Prop 8 passed, so it's like "fuck. really?"
Big handbags are awesome, okay? It lets me carry all sorts of furtive things, like food and drinks into movie theaters and yellowcake into classified tradeoff--
i have said too much!
(The teeny cell phones are dumb, though. Mine is well fit to my hand and that's good enough for me.)
How about the advent of bluetooth? People talking to midair and looking silly until you realize there is actually something in their ear.
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I think we've done a good job separating the turn of this century from the end of last century, technologically. Just like the industrial revolution started in the 19th century, but really peaked in the 20th, so has the information revolution.
As for how cheesy we'll look. Well, just go back and watch Darkwing Duck or early episodes of The X-Files and tell me if it's not a lot cheesier than you remember it. Reality TV will be looked at like we think of the old game show fad. Also, I'm sure history will record the ridiculous gas price fluctuations of the past 7 years. I'd like to put together a time capsule PC for the future, just so I can experience the cheesy nostalgia firsthand.
edit: on the subject of bluetooth, we'll probably be ridiculed for the terrible molded plastic and bright blue light
It's corny already, but nobody cares.
You're right though, future generations will go "What the fuck 00's?
That's more men's fashion, though.
As for emo, I don't think anybody's going to remember it as anything but a favored whipping boy, kind of like a hilarious Vietnam. We make way too much fun of it, and they never appear in current films, which is where many stereotypes come from.
If they ever show somebody watching TV during this decade, though, it'll be the Daily Show or Colbert Report, and they'll be reading Harry Potter.
and the endless number of movie remakes.