…and moreover, the 00’s were marked by the government trying to scare the bejeezus out of people. But those color-coded terror alerts worked only so long, and eventually people quit duct-taping their homes and started living again.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned already, but here ya go:
Depending on how successfully the Affordable Care Act is implemented, the 2010’s will come to represent the era that saw the US get as close as it has ever gotten to having universal health care.
Maybe some people don’t care about that, but I think that that’s pretty fucking significant.
To me, starting in 2008 was when the roles of financial and military crises reversed.
In 2001-2008, we were still having financial crises, but there was a trust, at least in my part, that we would get through it somehow without it just completely imploding. Yet I feared what stupid foreign policy disaster we would get into next.
Whereas now, while certainly the world isn’t much safer, I trust that the government will not actively screw things up. Whereas I do not have that trust about the financial health of the country. And that happens to be entirely not Obama’s fault, but that’s still been the zeitgeist for me (oxymoron?) since 2008.
Musically: I think pop music is a lot more electronically oriented than it was in the early 2000s, when it was a little more hip hop/soul. You don’t hear anyone doing the Mariah Carey sound really these days, although 2005 was her second peak in popularity.
Fashion: Lots more men wear facial hair. Tighter-fitting garments on men (although this started perhaps 2007-08). A lot less khakis and square-toe shoes. In general, perhaps more consciously preppy attire, or at least “quoting” it in a semi-ironic fashion.
The elevation of “geek” to a desirable epithet. I don’t think this necessarily augurs any changes in what people like (or used to like); I think that’s actually been pretty constant. But people want to be seen as enjoying allegedly obscure or quirky or otherwise non-plebeian hobbies. Compare the popularity of Freaks and Geeks to Glee.
I mean, I don’t think there is a vast gulf between these two decades (or any two consecutive decades). But there are always trends that pass in and out of fashion.
And now nobody ever puts their phone in their purse–they are out, constantly, being texted upon, being used to hear music, being used to surf the internet.
The culture is stagnant today. I think the 80s culture developed into 90s culture which transformed into sub cultures of the 2000s which included technology subcultures and social networking subcultures intertwining into a general malaise subculture and stagnated after 2006, perhaps 2007.
I fail to see any evidence of an intelligent sublcure or culture today.
Wikipedia. It existed in 2003 and was useful for some things, but nothing like the source-of-all-knowledge (or at least “starting point for research into all knowledge”) it is today.
Yeah, I don’t agree with this at all. I don’t know what you mean by “intelligent subculture,” but my life and how I culturally interact with people today is quite different than 2006/7, and most of that is technologically and social network related. Just the influence of Facebook alone in culture is massive, whether you like it or not. And I have yet to get on Twitter, but that’s been an incredible cultural shift, too. I mean, hell, it was used to help coordinate the Arab Spring. I mean, holy crap, that’s amazing.
What a pile of crap.
I think this is a huge change from 5-10 years ago. I’m a college professor, and I’ve noticed that most of my students have their phone out all the time. I almost never hear them ring in class; I think all the students have them on vibrate–or maybe people don’t call anymore anyway; they text instead. In any case, I don’t often encounter the ringing-cellphone disruption in class. Instead, the phones act as distractors. Students will have them out in their lap or on their desk and text or do whatever in class, in between taking notes.
An enormous amount of stuff has changed in the last 10 years. One of the big ones is the internet and particularly social media. In 2003, there was no facebook, no twitter, no youtube, web design was still pretty simple, high speed internet connections were still not too common, and smartphones didn’t exist.
I also think pop culture is changing significantly because of these technology advances. In the 80s and 90s, fads would start slowly and last a long time because that stuff traveled through TV and other pop culture. Today, I can see a fad come up and be old and tired in a matter of months, sometimes even less if it gets really played out. To this end, I think defining culture by decades will pretty much start to come to an end because a decade will just be a list of 10 years worth of various fads rather than a set of fads that defined the culture for the whole time.
In that mind, i think the '00s will be the last such decade. Where it began is somewhere between the dot com burst, Bush’s election, and 9/11. So depending on where you want to look at the culture, it is defined by the quick spreading of the internet and all of the culture and issues that raised, like intellectual rights, music and video sharing, internet memes. It will also be defined by terrorism, nationalism, the wars, and massive political polarization and divisiveness, at least here in the US. From that, we see the real rise of social media, hyper-connectedness, the 24-hour news cycle.
As for where it ends, that’s a lot harder to say and that’s part of why I see it difficult to continue seeing decades. All of the political stuff changed as early as 2008 with the election of Obama, but we also see the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and the Occupy movement in 2011. We’ve seen the wars start to come to an end in the last few years as well. But from a cultural standpoint, it seems to me that once facebook and youtube and twitter became ubiquitous, that’s when culture really started to change. But we’re still pretty close to it all, and it’s hard to see exactly where transitions occur without more historical perspective. But for the time, I could see people defining that as a relatively short decade as early as 2006-2007 with the backlash against Bush and the rise of social media, or as late as 2010 or 2011, or maybe even defining that whole period from 2006-2011 as a different sort of half-decade all its own.
And just look at the culture of marriage equality, too. This decade it seems we’ve finally reached the tipping point where a majority of US citizens support legal recognition of same-sex marriage. I mean, that’s also quite amazing to me. As someone who grew up in the 80s, it seems rather unbelievable to see such a dramatic shift in culture. Of course, it’s been fomenting over time, but it really seems to me that it’s in the late 2000s/early 2010s where support has especially risen.
Interesting to read this thread and not a single person has mentioned that we have a black President who won re-election, which was something NOT in the cards in 2003 (it was up in the air whether we would have a black President or a female President first, but nobody considered that either would occur within 5 years.)
Desktop computers are pretty much extinct. Computer labs consist of laptops and hard drives, and the younger generations do all their Internet surfing on phones.
2003 didn’t have Twilight, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Hunger Games, Paranormal Activity, Glee, The Office, True Blood (though the books TB was based were there), House, M.D, Criminal Minds, Bones, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and their boatloads of imitators. Japanese anime and J-Horror were big. Most people still owned VCRs. Blockbuster still did business.
There are more apocalyptic, dystopian, conspiracy, and parallel-universe centered stories now and those that existed before have experienced a resurge in popularity. Twist endings are more common but have gotten more predictable due to saturation.
Holocaust deniers are more vocal, and so are controversial religious sects like the Westboro Baptist Church. People are more protective of their kids, to the point where terms like “helicopter parent” and “snowflake” are common parlance. People respect geeks more, although bullying and peer pressure are still pervasive problems.
New Orleans certainly has changed since 2003.
Today I …
- listened to the new Jay-Z song
- made an international call
- played video Blackjack
- found a branch of my bank that was open late on Saturdays
- navigated to it
- found out it was free cone day at Brusters
- took pictures of the clown making balloon animals at Brusters
- pre-confirmed my boarding pass for tomorrow’s flight
- checked with the hotel about their pool policy
- ordered new checks
- took a survey
- read a fair bit of news
- ordered a book
- made a bid on an auction for a new pair of shoes
- and posted on this board
all from my phone.
This is far more than just the phone at work. In 2003, not only would I not have an iphone to do all of this, none of the services that I used would have been available. No online banking, no cheap entertainment apps, the prevalence of paypal, skype, facebook, etc. The difference between the internet 2003 and the internet now is almost like the wild west pre and post gold-rush.
Everybody in this thread so is focusing mainly on technology and culture, which is sort of what the OP implied he has in mind.
What about the really big issues, like overall world events and international relations, and the so-called “world order”. The REALLY BIG earth-changing event of relatively modern times, separating “then” from “now” was the end of the Cold War. Of course, this happened somewhat gradually and fitfully in the later part of the 1900’s ( a whole century ago! ), but if you wanted to pin a definitive, final date to it, it would be in December 1991 when the late unlamented Soviet Union went poof. That put the final irreversible nail in the coffin of the Cold War (as we understood “Cold War” then).
All the talk then was how the old “world order” had ended and a “new world order” had begun, just like the end of the Third Age of Middle Earth. Of course what really happened IMHO was an end to a genuine world order (the Cold War), but it would take a good many years for a new world order to emerge to take its place. So far, I think I’ve been right about that.
So if you’re looking for the Really Big Changes in the world that have happened lately, I think that’s where it was.
It’s funny but when I heard Obama’s keynote speech at the Democratic 2004 convention, I said to a coworker the next day that I think he would be President some day but not in 2008 since there was no way we would elect a black President in 2008.
In 2004 I was flying to Chicago and picked up Newsweek or Time in the airport for a minor distraction on the flight. There was an article about a Chicago politician called Barack Obama and how he was a likely candidate for POTUS some day. I only even noted the article because I was going to Chicago. It was probably 3 years before he appeared on my radar again. I don’t recall if the article said when he’d be POTUS but I hope whoever wrote it put a few bucks on him winning it.
Not by anyone I’ve met (in Australia) they aren’t. 
I’ve seen the term used occasionally in the sort of magazines you see in doctor’s waiting rooms and at supermarket checkouts (where it’s acceptable to have words like “OMG”, “Fash”, “Spesh” and “Bestie” on the cover), but never actually heard anyone say it in reference to the time period. Then again, we still haven’t worked out whether it’s “Two thousand and thirteen” or “Twenty-Thirteen” yet, either…
I really think it depends where you were. I’d suggest online shopping really didn’t take off in Australia until probably 2007ish, about the time Debit Credit cards became widely available. Even in 2003, pretty much everyone had a mobile phone though, or so it seemed.
One thing I’ve noticed is that emo/goth subculture seems to have faded from popular view, and been replaced with… hipsters (which were, in my recollection, a type of jeans in 2003).
Avoiding obvious stuff like advances in computers/gaming/technology, changes in music (Dubstep is the major one I can think of, with rap/RnB being less prevalent now than I recall it being 10 years ago), I honestly don’t think a lot has changed culturally in the last 10 years. Fashions are still (more or less) the same, cars still look pretty much the same, etcetera. I suspect a lot of people could find themselves back in 2003 (having mysteriously forgotten any useful sports or sharemarket information!) and simply shrug and carry on without really being too put out by it - whereas 1993 and 2003 were very different places, IMHO.
Well, I realized a couple of months ago that music videos from the 90’s had truly horrendous colours. Lots of bright reds, greens and blues.
This, for instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm9GlSbxy78
That’s my feeling, too.