End of Ten (2000-2010)
Didn’t it go fast?
Let’s take a sec to think back…
We’re looking back in reflection as we come to the end of the first decade of the third millennium – the end of the first ten years of the 2000s.
The 2000s is the decade that started on January 1, 2000 and ends today, December 31, 2009 – Happy New Year!
The decade was dominated by several wide-ranging topics, including international trade, a growing concern over 2000s energy crisis, the explosion in telecommunications and data communications, the ecological crisis, a widespread economic failure in the last quarter of the decade, further integration and dependence on technology, concerns with international terrorism and war, natural disasters, an escalation of the social issues of the 1990s, and the global warming debate.
Let’s kick it off by looking at Popular Culture:
Film
* Oscar winners: Gladiator (2000), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Chicago (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), Million Dollar Baby (2004), Crash (2005), The Departed (2006), No Country for Old Men (2007), Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
* Some of Hollywood’s most notable blockbuster films of the 2000s include: The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean-film series, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Harry Potter-film series, Shrek-film series, Spider-Man-film series, Ice Age-film series, Finding Nemo, Star Wars Prequel trilogy, Transformers-film series, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Da Vinci Code, The Chronicles of Narnia-film series, The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, 2012, Up, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Kung Fu Panda, The Incredibles, Hancock, Ratatouille and The Passion of the Christ.
* Usage of computer-generated imagery (CGI) became more widespread in films during the 2000s.
* Documentary and mockumentary films, such as “March of the Penguins” and “Super Size Me”, were popular in the 2000s.
* Online films become popular.
* More movies started using three dimensional (3D) projection such as Avatar.
Music
1 by The Beatles, the best-selling album of the decade.
The best-selling albums of the decade were by rapper Eminem and 1960’s rock band The Beatles. Billboard magazine named Eminem and Beyoncé as the artists with the best performance on the Billboard charts.
The Rolling Stones had the highest grossing tour ever and Madonna had the highest grossing tour ever by a solo artist. ($$$$$$$$$$)
Pop legend Michael Jackson died in June 2009, creating the largest public mourning since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales 12 years earlier in 1997.
Television
* Flat-screen TVs become popular
* TV becomes available on the net of some mobile phones.
* HD TV becomes very popular towards the last quarter of the decade.
* Reality TV, Talent shows and cooking programs grow in popularity.
Sports
Major events of the decades included three summers Olympic Games. The Sydney Games, held in 2000, followed the hundredth anniversary of the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996. The Athens Games, in 2004, were also a strong symbol, for modern Olympic Games were inspired by the competitions organized in Ancient Greece. Finally, the Beijing Games saw the emergence of China as a major sports power, with the highest number of titles for the first time. The 2002 Salt Lake City and the 2006 Turin Olympic Games were also major events, though less popular.
Football (soccer) went on gaining popularity in the world, as the two World Cups organized in South Korea, Japan, and Germany were major worldwide events, while regional events Copa América and Euro Cup were also popular. Rugby increased in size and audience, as the Rugby World Cup became the third most watched sporting event in the world with the 2007 Rugby World Cup organized in France.
Most popular individual sports were dominated by champions. Michael Schumacher, the most titled F1 driver, won five F1 World Championships during the decade and finally retired in 2006, yet eventually confirming his come-back to F1 for 2010. Lance Armstrong won all the Tour de France between 1999 and 2005, also an all-time record. Swiss tennis player Roger Federer won 15 Grand Slam titles to become the most titled player. Tiger Woods made significant achievements in golf tournaments.
Computer and video games
* The number-one-selling game console as of 2009, the PlayStation 2, was released in 2000 and remained popular up to the end of the decade, even after PlayStation 3 was released.
* Popular video games include Gran Turismo, FIFA, the Pokemon series, Madden NFL, The Sims and its sequels, the Halo series, Wii Sports, Nintendogs, Grand Theft Auto, the Call of Duty series and World of Warcraft.
* Online gaming became very popular, especially seen in games such as World of Warcraft, released in 2004 and with many expansion packs in the years following.
Fashion
Significant fashion trends of the 2000s include:
* Crocs (can’t mess with these personally)
* Livestrong wristband
* Ugg boots (can’t touch these either)
* Wings (haircut)
Print media
* The decade has seen the steady decline of books, magazines and newspapers as the main conveyors of information and advertisements.
* News blogs have grown in readership and popularity; cable news and other online media outlets became competitive in attracting advertising revenues and capable journalists and writers are joining online organizations. Books became available online, and electronic devices such as Amazon Kindle threatened the popularity of printed books.
* According to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the decade has shown a continuous increase in reading, although circulation of newspapers has declined in conjunction with the Economic Recession.
Overall…
The big picture I see this decade is the decline of Western self-confidence. If the 90s witnessed plenty of “irrational exuberance” in a “New World Order” following the West’s triumph over its Cold War opponents, the 00s saw feeble attempts to define Islam as a worthy opponent, and a spate of misguided wars “justified” by the “wake-up call” of 9/11.
But a cave somewhere in Afghanistan isn’t the Kremlin, and Bin Laden isn’t Stalin (he probably isn’t even real). Despite a naked neo-imperialism posited on an unholy alliance between Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations and the right-wing appropriation of liberal ideas like human rights and democracy, the neo-cons’ New American Century lasted about five years. It was rapidly replaced by a more powerful meme: the rise of the rest, and particularly India and China.
Design
Just as hemlines follow the economy, so design follows geopolitics. If the confident 90s could give us a computer that “comes in colors” (the iMac, which echoed the optimism of the 60s and was sold with a 60s soundtrack), the 00s returned us to self-effacing “I’m not really here” products embarrassed by their environmental footprint, getting the job done and playing it safe. Cars took on the colors of the road beneath, clothes were basic and functional, sold by puritan chains like Uniqlo and Gap, computers returned to black, white or grey, and the eccentricities of — say — digital camera design in the 90s gave way to formula and standardisation; gone were the flip screens, the weird cigarette packet shapes, the separation of audio and video; now all digicams — just like the cars caught worldwide in Google Streetview snaps — were basically the same bland box. Strapped by recession and hounded by eco-guilt, people didn’t want to lust for consumer items, they just wanted them to last. Designers like Naoto Fukasawa made inexpressiveness into a philosophy: the “unobtrusive but indispensable” world of supernormal.
Exceptions
There were a couple of exceptions. The iPhone (and iPod Touch, for that matter) was such a leap forward that I still feel, when I use it, that I’m in an episode of Star Trek. It was Jonathan Ive’s Thomas Jerome Newton moment; its various technologies were so advanced, so neatly fused that you could no longer talk of mere incremental improvements: this was sci-fi, a tool from another planet. Google also amazed, becoming to the 00s what Microsoft had been to the 90s. There was Google mail, Google apps, the verb “to google”, Google docs, Google TV (in the shape of YouTube), Google Maps, Google Earth, two Google operating systems, a Google phone, a Google motto (“Don’t be evil”) and a Google politics (don’t rock the boat in China). When I first heard that Google mail read your mail in order to target you with ads, I was horrified. Five years later, I don’t know how I lived without it. And I’ve never seen a single ad.
Music
It was, in some ways, the decade in which pop music died. People started expecting their music for free, the big “we-are-the-world” type audiences built up by national broadcasters and MTV in former decades fragmented into a million tiny digital taste-channels. Demographics meant that the boomers upped the age profile of the average pop consumer, therefore making the medium itself feel middle-aged, and critics continued to laud the late 60s and early 70s as pop music’s artistic peak. The odds of bringing out, tomorrow, the best pop album ever made and changing the game forever grew ridiculously long. The chances of there even being a record shop to sell it in, if you did, also slimmed considerably. Meanwhile, the music industry committed hara kiri by sueing individual consumers for millions (the RIAA will “win” against Tenenbaum, but lose the entire game). Popular music felt played, but also unplayed. It was everywhere, yet, culturally, nowhere. It thrived live, but the death of “the king of pop” felt to many like the death of pop itself. It’s certainly the death of a certain model of anglo-american-yet-global pop, a 20th century form of cultural imperialism which won’t be reproduced in the 21st century.
RIP
Magazines and newspapers ended the decade looking very unhealthy indeed, although books seemed strong. Young people got a lot less interested in cars, leading some to label Japan a post-car society. Detroit pretty much collapsed. The polar ice caps melted rapidly; climate change is a fact. Banks — having invented what they thought were clever ways to spread risk around, and play with planet-sized sums of entirely fictional money — looked pretty shaky. As a result of the financial crisis, some declared the thirty-year neo-liberal project to privatize, incentivize and globalize over. Nicolas Bourriaud declared postmodernism dead, replaced by something he called the Altermodern. Attacks in the British press helped to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Undead
Moral panics were very much alive, but switched to video games. Television in the UK and Japan seemed not to die, although it went thin and flat. The art world resurrected Modernism, which became the key to oblique, personal shows like Documenta 12. Although Hollywood was on the skids, the genre of documentary film saw a surprising and welcome resurgence, with docs appearing on everything from fast food to the Helvetica typeface, and winning prizes. There was also a worldwide resurgence in national film industries, which came back from near-oblivion to take, in some cases, more than 50% of local box office — one cultural consequence, perhaps, of the trend we started with, the decline of the West and the “rise of the rest”. The financial crisis strengthened the European Union, as small maverick nations like Iceland saw membership as the only way to survive. The European project was vindicated by the successful launch of a single currency and its model of peaceful conquest by economic self-interest proved vastly more effective than the anglo-saxon neo-imperialist war model. But let’s not forget the rebirth of hope via Obama. Whether his lucid and enlightened interventions can reverse the master narrative of American decline is another matter. It’s interesting that his current hope is that China will become a huge market for American products — in other words, that America will become to China what China formerly was to America.
Personally
I began the decade in New York City, traveled to Tokyo, Los Angeles, Montreal, Rome, Hong Kong, Miami, Nanjing, Shanghai, Chicago, Boston, DC, Baltimore, Kansas, San Diego, San Fransisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Philly, Vegas, Dallas and I almost moved to London. I got reacquainted with my passion for fashion, art, anime, manga, architecture, interior design, industrial design, retail marketing, the internet and became more global musically. I started blogging in 2003, and it became the hub of my activities this decade, leading to a plethora of experiences and contacts. By decade’s end, though, blogging was imploding, whittling itself down to microblogging and phatic status updates. The question “What are you doing?” has never been answered more, or imported less. Meanwhile, about 80% of the world’s population aren’t on the internet. What are they doing?
Anyway, Thanks for reading this l-o-n-g winded post (lol).
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
GOMMI ARCADE 2010
Tags: Architecture, Art, blockbuster films, chronicles of narnia film, crystal skull, Da Vinci Code, dependence on technology, Design, ecological crisis, economic failure, Fashion, Film, Futurism, harry potter film, kung fu panda, march of the penguins, matrix revolutions, million dollar baby, music, shrek film, spider man film, star wars prequel, star wars prequel trilogy, super size me, Technology, technology concerns
