2009 - Looking Back

(Warning – it’s probably going to be a double-post day).
It’s the last day of the decade (well, that’s debateable, but I say it is), and I feel I should be getting all reflective and ponderous, because that’s what History students do at times like this. The ‘noughties’ have been a hugely complex ten years, though, so I’m not quite sure what to say. Or perhaps every decade seems like this when you look back on it so immediately. I’m going to do this the easy way, and talk about the ten things that I think we’ll remember about 2000 – 2009 for some time to come. I’ve probably missed out a lot of important things :-s But, in no particular order:

1. 9/11. I remember that the millennium was full of talk about the things that would dominate the next ten or hundred years, all these plans and hopes, and then something smashes, out of the blue, into the world’s consciousness in 2001, and everything changes. Of course nothing ever ‘just happens’, there’s always a build-up of history and policies, and the reactions to them, but for most of us this seemed to come out of nowhere. Deaths are tragic, civilian death tolls that run into the thousands even more so, but it was done in such a visual way, and it was broadcast so widely, that it’s difficult to imagine people forgetting about 9/11 for hundreds of years. And it’s difficult to see America and the UK getting out of the direction of foreign policy that was chosen afterwards for quite some time. The aftershocks could still be felt in thirty or forty years. But perhaps everyone says this about the tragedies that happen in their lifetime. I wonder how the next generation will see it.

2. The media got . . . wider. I’m not sure how to explain this, just that there are more television channels than ever before, and more ways to access news and shows online . . . it’s bizarre now to think that most of the UK only had four TV channels back in 1999. Now, even if you have the standard Freeview package, there’s 30 or so. Wider means more choice, but perhaps it also means those shared shows becoming less frequent . . . certainly, back in the day of two or three channels there were certain TV ‘experiences’ that the whole nation had, and everyone talked about it. Even now, Doctor Who, Wallace and Gromit, reality show finals – some of these draw in 18 or 19 million viewers at their peak. These TV ‘events’ seem to be declining, though, and I’m not sure if we’ll experience TV in the same way by 2020.

3. Reality TV, and 'interactive' TV in general – celebrity culture, the changes to the music scene brought in by these ‘vote for the next music sensation’ shows. They dominate more in America, perhaps, than they do here, but there’s been a steady decline in dramas and more serious documentaries for these cheap to make, and crowd-drawing shows. I’m as guilty of watching as the next person, and some of them are genuinelly entertaining, but when they are so easy to make, and often more popular, than more ‘quality’ TV, what will this do to the industry in the near future? It will be interesting to see if any channel, apart from the BBC, will still be making dramas by 2020.

4. We wanted to communicate with each other, and we did. Whether it was writing a blog, or uploading videos onto Youtube, twittering, finding a new unsigned favourite singer, or abandoning TV for short-films made by someone in their back-garden, the middle-man was cut out as we talked and got creative. This is a trend that I hope does continue. The world seems like a much smaller place.

5. Celebration of nerd culture. Suddenly nerdiness was cool. Comic book movies and sci-fi reigned at the box office. Animation was king. People expressed their inner-nerd on the internet, and TV and the movies scrambled to keep up. You were left wondering how many of us had been nerds all along, hidden in the corner as the cool-kid minority ruled.

6. The environment and global warming became big news. These topics have rarely been out of the classrooms, news and documentaries for most of the decade. We saw extreme weather and natural disasters, we began to worry about where our food was grown, our carbon footprints. Sci-fi show after sci-fi show began to focus on how the world would be, not in two hundred years time, but in fifty. Sadly, 2009 has ended with little answer from the politicians, so everything still seems up in the air.

7. The credit crunch. Proving once again that house prices cannot just go up and up and up . . . I still don’t understand the ins and outs of it, because I don’t have a head for finance, but I think it’s safe to say that it will be a while before we, especially those of us in the UK, see our countries recover.

8. Hurricane Katrina, and the Boxing Day Tsunami. Both already seem partly forgotten by anyone not directly impacted, but I wonder if each won’t be seen with renewed importance as the years go by. Both were devastating, though on two different scales. The response to each said a lot about society in this decade, both good and bad. I think the two disasters will be re-visited a lot by the historians of the future.

9. President Obama’s campaign. Whether his presidency will be remembered fondly remains to be seen, but the whole grassroots and new media movement that helped get him into office was exciting. Suddenly everyone wanted to be American. Politics had never been so interesting. It was thrilling to feel part of something like that, and I’m not sure there’ll be another campaign with that ‘hopeful’ feel for a long time – we tend to get cynical of these things second time around.

10. And I guess that, on a personal note, this was the decade where I did most of my growing up. I was 12 when it started, and I’m 22 now, so the ‘noughties’ saw me through high-school, sixth-form and most of university. I made lots of the decisions about who I was, and what I liked, and where and what I was going to study, that will probably affect most of the rest of my life. I made some good friends, watched my younger siblings grow up, and am hopefully at least a little more balanced than I was ten years ago :) So these are ten years that I’m certainly not planning on forgetting.