Tuesday 5 Jan, 2010

This blog is actually a day delayed due to the internet blow up experienced in the USA Zone yesterday. There was much crashing and bashing as the digital electronic information age came to a grinding halt. I am not sure how we survived without Wikipedia (motto: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story) for a day.

The decade has gone.

I have been reading a few interesting jots and jottings about what the last decade was all about, and two descriptions have stuck with me.

One, that it was the Decade of the Amateur. That the internet and Reality TV introduced the world to people that previously had no way of projecting themselves. This resulted in the masses choosing to read unknown bloggers rather than the NY Times and choosing to watch home made YouTube videos rather than a BBC drama.

The decade started with Big Brother, a show about ordinary people around doing nothing, and ended with X Factor, a show about ordinary people doing something.

In the advertising industry this ‘power to the people’ manifested itself with companies / brands indulging in a spot of DIY using Getty, iMovie, Facebook, Blogs and such.

Two, that it was the Decade of Insecurity. Which is a shame as the Noughties started with the cold war nicely wrapped up in a history book, the world seemed happy in the sole stewardship of the US and prosperity was providing tasty middle classness and flat screens to all.

Then in 2000 the dotcoms went bang, a year later the Twin Towers (capitalism and democracy) crashed down and for the rest of the decade we all had to take our shoes off at airports and protect our computers from 14 year old hackers. Does anyone remember the 80′s TV show ‘Hackers’? It seemed like a cool thing to do, ride your BMX bike during the day and hack bad guys at night.

And we ended the decade even more insecure; “thanks” to any bankers out there.

Tatts

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