Review of the Decade: The Social 00’s

A new year and decade are upon us, and I’m in the mood to reminisce about the decade that has just passed.

Is Time Passing More Quickly?

Within a single decade I moved from grade school, through the awkward high school years, and on to college. I now find myself only 129 days from graduating, not that I’m counting down of course. Following that I’ll be starting another chapter in my life. It was only a decade ago that my parents imparted their wisdom to me. “Enjoy life,” they said. “Time will pass faster than you think.” I never really understood until I started college. A long time ago, must be the 90s, time seemed to pass so slowly. Summer lasted for ages and there was always time to do things. A few ages later is seems like large chunks of time pass without my noticing. On the eve of this new decade I was further reminded of this passage of time.

After visiting family down in Texas for Christmas I found myself waiting in the San Antonio airport for my flight to whisk me home. Sitting across from me were two young girls and their mother. She was explaining to the girls the good ole’ days. She told how in the old days Grandpa and Grandma would come and sit with them at the gate and wave to them as the plane departed. This immediately invoked good memories of my grandparents and relatives crowding the waiting area to see us off. The girls of course wanted to know why they couldn’t do this now. The mother tried to explain the terrorist attacks in 2001. The mother remarked that they had not been alive when it happened. My train of thought was derailed. How did I get so old that kids don’t know what 9/11 was? After pondering the implications of this passage of time and the annoyance of current airport security measures I put my headphones on and commanded my iPhone to play “And When I Die” by Peter, Paul & Mary.

Tech Changes

• I remember being introduced to Google for the first time right around the start of the decade
• I was sponsored by Google in the Google Summer of Code program at the end of the decade
• I remember the sweet irritating sounds of the dialup modem and shelling out money for my own Earthlink subscription because my parent’s ISP (Juno) was only capable of 28k speeds and my modem achieved 48k through Earthlink. Silly me
• I remember using the early Firefox betas before version 1.0 back in the day when it was actually fast
• I got my first MP3 player from my uncle and my portable CD player went to the wayside
• My interest in shortwave radio was replaced with new social networking sites that arose
• WinMX peaked and died along with TechTV, and Bittorrent quickly rose
• I ditched Microsoft Windows Vista in favor of Mac OS X Tiger

That’s just the tip of the ice berg.

Nickname of the Decade (2000-2010)

Since early 2007 I wondered what this decade would be nicknamed. For example, the roaring 20’s. While still unofficial, I dub this decade:

The Social 00’s

read: the social zeros