The damn 2010’s are almost over and I cant tell the difference. I could tell you the diff between 50’s-60’s-70’s-80’s-90’s based on the multiple multiple characteristics of songs and movies and fashion. Hell i could break down the 70’s by increments of three years.
Not so much the last 19 years…yes yes, I agree getting old is involved (note i wasnt alive for the 50’s and half the 60’s) but i still think i have a point.
I’d call it the age of tech.
It’s when non-nerd types were buying computers, downloading songs on their Ipod, and slowly giving up their pagers for flip phones.
2000’s were more optimistic. We thought the 9/11 terrorists would be dealt with and life would continue like it always had. The US was still a world leader and relations with Russia were very good.
Obama ran on Hope. It seemed like a lot of positive changes were coming. The Democrats controlled Congress.
Reality and pessimism sunk in during the next decade. War on terror shows no sign of ending. Obama’s legacy is very mixed. Putin has completely changed the US-Russia relationship.
The next decade looks even worse.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
All the websites still had comments sections is a good way to spot you’re in the 2000’s or early 2010’s if you time travelled.
I’m going to butcher this, but it can probably be characterized by nostalgia or being very prone to documentation. Something like that.
I’ve read that one of the reasons the whole “90’s kids” thing is a thing is because the 90s and 2000s are the most documented generation in history. Everything that the millennials did, watched, listened to, enjoyed or touched is documented and accesable in some form on the internet. This has slowly bled into every generation and now you can look up pretty much anything from recent technological history and have it at your fingertips. As a 90s kid I can pop on Youtube and watch clips of Gullah Gullah Island because I watched that growing up. Same with my grandparents and looking up old westerns or Howdy Doody…everything is there. When you have such access to your youth it makes you even more nostalgic for that time and makes the hellscape that is modern times look even worse.
So my dumb vocabulary wants to say it’s the era of accessible nostalgia.
Terrorism.
Apparently, nothing else of significance happened.
I have this theory that the first two decades of a century don’t develop an identity partly because there is no convenient name that everyone agrees on; 00’s is awkward and 10’s is not much better. With the 20’s we will finally be able to refer to a decade conveniently and I expect that after another 6-7 years it will develop an identity of some kind.
As for the last 20 years, I think the culture has been transformed by technology and the Internet. Netflix, Youtube, social media, podcasting, Kindle, smartphones etc. Mostly for the better IMO; because while there is a staggering amount of junk, our access to the very best of global culture has never been better and we can mostly choose to ignore the junk and focus on the good stuff. In particular I think the “golden age of television” is real and is still going strong. TV is a lot more varied and interesting than it used to be and I think it will remain that way for both economic and cultural reasons.
The 2000s were the internet decade. Yeah, it existed before, but the 2000s was when everyone and their mother got connected.
I recall conservative / “heartland” culture taking prominence in the 2000s. Lance Armstrong “Live Strong” bracelets and Support the Troops bumper magnets were ubiquitous. Texas-based businesses (petroleum, military contractors, Enron, etc.) were always in the news. Evangelicals had massive political clout (the Terri Schiavo affair, etc). Gas prices were sky high but Hummers were extremely popular anyway. NPR had lots of military stories - and even hipsters became pro-war (movies like Team America: World Police expressed this) and experimented with NASCAR and country music fandom.
2000-2010: When nerd stuff got mainstreamed. (still ongoing)
2010-Present: When everyone got on their fancy phones and in-person, human interaction began it’s death spiral. (still ongoing)
Or, contrarily, 2010-Present: When everyone got on their fancy phones and in-person, human interaction began its renaissance.
The number of different people we interact with in-person is going down, but the amount of times I meet with people in-person that I never would have in the past has gone way, way up. Old friends from college I haven’t seen in ages message me to say they’re coming to town for a convention/vacation and I meet up with them. Never would have done that without my smart phone.
Just the tip.
In the realm of politics and government, the 2000s was the Terrorism decade - 9/11, anthrax, the shoe bomber, the Underwear bomber, etc… Trillions of dollars and many lives lost later, terrorism has faded somewhat as a concern. In its place we have the 2010s, the Populism and Identity Decade.
Technologically, the 2000s was the when the Internet took off (starting in about 1998). The 2010s that subset of the Internet known as Social Media became the Thing. (Yeah, there was MySpace back in the 2000s, but it was pretty bad, so I ignore it)
And India.
A time of Paranoia & Corruption.
In fashion, it’s pretty easy to find comparison or “remember this?” style articles. Which leads me to think that it might be less “There was nothing defining about that decade” and more “SDMB skews older with people who stopped paying attention to fashion trends in 1995”. I suspect this probably extends to other cultural trends except, again, we have a disproportionate number of people around here who proudly stopped buying new music in 1988 and enjoy saying things like “I don’t even know what a Taylor Swift is.” Such people probably missed EDM music blowing up in the 2010s or other genre shifts.
Too late to edit but I should have also mentioned K-pop in there which starting getting big in the western market in the past ten years.
For me, I felt when listening to indie/alternative stations, there was still music with rock instrumentation and a strong rock beat being played back then, while in the 2010s, maybe a little later, it has all turned into this relaxed, pop- or folk-rock type of thing. It may very well be the stations I listen to, but I just don’t hear as much post-punk influenced stuff like Franz Ferdinand or White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys, the Hives and that sort of stuff going on, or something with that intensity. Now I feel like it’s all more poppy mellow stuff like the Revivalists, Vance Joy, Head and the Heart, Lumineers, that sort of stuff. I know there are bands with more traditional rock fire out there, but the radio playlists have been just so mellow the last few years compared with the middle years of the 2000s.
And I also much preferred the Top 40 pop music of the 2000s compared with the 2010s. I’m still a sucker for Top 40, but it feels like it’s really gotten same soundy in the past decade and less “fun” than the 2000s.
In the U.S. at least, it’s when reality became optional.