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A New Millennium

At midnight on January 1, 2000, the clock ticked over into not only a new decade but also a new millennium, and the world wondered what lay in store for this new age. During the 1990s, new trends in business and entertainment had emerged to feed America’s unprecedented prosperity. The first decade of the 2000s would see continual development of these trends to the point that they exerted a major—and in some cases, negative—influence on people’s lives. Though the end of the Cold War (1945–91) had left the United States as the world’s only superpower, the decade would also see a new threat—foreign terrorism—emerge in place of communism.

On September 11, 2001, the real bogeymen of the decade emerged, and they were all too human. A group of nineteen religious extremists, acting on plans masterminded by al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden (1957–2011), hijacked four domestic passenger planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. The events of 9/11, as that dark day came to be called, scarred America and its allies deeply. Within days of the attacks, President George W. Bush (1946–) had announced a new War on Terror, an international effort to wipe out terrorism.

Domestically, the trend towards globalizing business operations that had begun in the 1990s continued at a rapid pace. The Internet came into its own during the first decade of the 2000s, speeding the process of globalization as it no longer became necessary for employees to gather together in the same location in order to conduct business. China and India in particular benefited from the outsourcing of American business overseas, and it soon became commonplace to hear an Indian accent on the phone when calling a corporation’s technical support or customer service phone number—there was even a TV show, Outsourced (2010–11), based on the premise.

The rise of the Internet also heralded massive changes in the ways Americans sought their entertainment and even communicated with one another. E-retailers like Amazon.com and the Apple iTunes Store offered consumers the ability to shop from the comfort of their home. In the case of digital music, book, and movie downloads, consumers could even enjoy instant access to their purchases. Digital music, in particular, had a major impact on the music industry and how people listened to music. With the ability to download selected songs individually, the age of the album came to a close. MP3 players allowed people to carry around libraries of thousands of songs in their pockets. Up-and-coming artists case of digital music, book, and movie downloads, consumers could even enjoy instant access to their purchases. Digital music, in particular, had a major impact on the music industry and how people listened to music. With the ability to download selected songs individually, the age of the album came to a close. MP3 players allowed people to carry around libraries of thousands of songs in their pockets. Up-and-coming artists also no longer needed to resort to seeking out the support of major labels in order to get their music heard.

Similarly, the advent of blogging sites and micro-blogs like Twitter gave people the ability to quickly and easily post their thoughts to the Internet with little to no knowledge of computer code required. As with the music and book industries, the world of journalism was rocked by this new technology. Suddenly amateur bloggers were scooping veteran reporters and helping to drive the news cycle.

These new technological changes may have made life easier for the consumer, but they heralded difficult times for the businesses that found their models suddenly outdated. Newspapers, book and music stores, and even major publishers and record labels could see that they needed to adapt rapidly to the new ways or perish. By giving everyone a voice, it ironically became harder to get noticed among the other competing writers, artists, musicians, and bloggers. The rise of social networking sites like Facebook, which was founded in 2004, provided central meeting places online for people to interact and share bits of their personal lives. Social networking, blogging, and web shopping, though convenient, led some critics to wonder if Americans were becoming too disconnected and decadent.

Matters did not improve when the world slipped into its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression at the end of the decade. Costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unregulated speculation in the housing market, and a variety of other factors combined to plunge the United States into economic crisis in 2008. Although Europe had been making strides towards a stronger economy, notably with the introduction of a continental currency called the Euro, the crisis hit certain countries like Greece and Iceland particularly hard. As if all the economic worries were not enough, the last years of the first decade of the 2000s also played host to intensified debate over the cause of and solution to the problem of climate change, popularly known as global warming. As the decade came to a close, many Americans began to question the impact their way of life was having on the world and started looking for ways to cut spending and living beyond their means.

Source Citation: “2000s.” Bowling, Beatniks, and Bell-Bottoms: Pop Culture of 20th- and 21st-Century America. Ed. Cynthia Johnson and Lawrence W. Baker. 2nd ed. Vol. 6: 2000-2009. Detroit: U*X*L, 2012. 1461-1467. Gale U.S. History In Context. Web. 7 Aug. 2012.

 Join us for our Last Decades Programs of the Summer!

Decades Documentaries – Hurricane Katrina: The Storm that Drowned a City (2000s) – Tuesday, August 7 @ 2PM – On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, killing at least 1,300, destroying over 600,000 houses, and turning downtown New Orleans into an uninhabitable swamp. In a compelling hour-by-hour reconstruction of the ferocious storm, NOVA exposes crucial failures in preparation and engineering that led to the worst disaster in U.S. history.

Decades Movies: Juno (2000s) – Friday, August 10 @ 2PM – Ellen Page, Michael Cera, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney. An unplanned pregnancy propels a confident, charming teen into one of life’s many detours, where she sets her sights on her ideal adoptive parents: an affluent couple longing to adopt their first child. (2007, 96min, PG-13)

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Time justified its choice of Albert Einstein as “Person of the Century” with a quotation from Einstein himself, “Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity.” However, the technological innovations that bore fruit in the 1990s, such as the Internet, the proliferation of personal computers, and genetic engineering, were all the products of long, painstaking work on the part of thousands of scientists and engineers who measured progress in the smallest of increments and who built on ground broken decades earlier. The changes were, nonetheless, momentous. At the beginning of the Gulf War, reporters for the Cable News Network (CNN) reported live from Baghdad. That reporters could cover the action live already seemed to be taken for granted, but never before had virtually instant coverage of developing events become so crucial and even so expected. Also, though the Internet had existed for decades as a way for computers to communicate with each other, the development of the World Wide Web and easy to use operating systems and programs as well as substantially cheaper, faster, and more powerful computers, gave millions of Americans a way to send e-mail, download music, and buy books “on-line.” The purpose and function of computers had changed: no longer were they used just to compute, but to communicate, advertise, and sell things. People could stay in touch more readily—e-mail seemed less intrusive than a phone call, and neither as formal nor as much trouble as writing a letter—-but in so doing, they became increasingly isolated from their real neighbors. Computers became more powerful, not just in what they enabled people to do, but in the ways their use shaped human behavior and made people dependent on them. The Y2K Bug demonstrated the power and the vulnerability of a digital society. The programming glitch that threatened to crash computers world-wide as their internal clocks turned from “99” to “00” caused doomsday scenarios to seem realistic and even sober people bought electric generators and stored away a few weeks of groceries just in case the electrical and commercial infrastructures failed at the stroke of midnight.

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A DECADE OF DECADES

In one sense nothing distinguished the 1980s as a decade; instead, its cultural preoccupations and political symbols were borrowed from other decades. Little during the time was original or new: almost universally the art and literature of the period required some sense of precedent in order to be under-stood; politics and culture seemed locked into agendas set prior to the decade. The dominant political figure of the era, President Ronald Reagan, expressed an economic philosophy derived from the 1920s (or, perhaps, from the 1890s), a populist rhetoric borrowed from the 1930s, the can-do optimism of the 1940s, and an anticommunism straight out of the 1950s. His political opponents at-tacked him via the liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s or through the social radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The arts and fashion in the 1980s were dominated by stylistic borrowings: Art Deco from the 1930s, Abstract Expressionism and film noir from the 1940s, commercial kitsch from the 1950s, rock music and countercultural experimentalism from the 1960s. American lifestyle during the decade witnessed a continuing clash between the Reagan generation, who derived their sense of the “normal” or “natural” from the 1940s and 1950s, and the baby boomers, who challenged these norms in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1980s, in other words, contained the volatile historical forces and cultural conflicts of much of twentieth-century America. –Read More Here.

THE NONDECADE?

It is easy to dismiss the 1970s as the decade that never happened. The political and cultural trends of the 1960s continued to dominate life in the United States at least until President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974; the political and cultural trends of the 1980s were manifested with increasing visibility for the remainder of the decade. Feminism, drugs, progressive education, busing, pornography, exotic religions, paranoia, welfare, ethnic politics, long hair, blue jeans, platform shoes, and amphetamines lingered from the 1960s. Conservativism, cowboys, televangelists, flag-waving, energy saving, rising cost of living, teen moms, pickup trucks, overseas investments, Sun Belt shift, cocaine, sound bites, and acid rain anticipated the 1980s. The 1970s, it seems, have little to define them except, perhaps, their nothingness. Peter Carroll, one of the earliest historians of the age, even titled his study It Seemed Like Nothing Happened (1982). Historical events, of course, occurred. The Kent State shootings, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the resignation of Nixon, the energy crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis all transpired during the course of the decade, but they are events identified with the spirit of the revolutionary 1960s or the avaricious 1980s.–Read More Here.