A decade in digital
Browsing the internet today has led me to the conclusion not only do the media love summing up the decade in top ten lists, but across those lists there appears to be one constant – social media, or to generalise further, the internet.
I don’t want to use this blog to state the obvious and regurgitate phrases like ‘the internet has changed the way we communicate’. That kind of comment is best reserved for the BBC Breakfast presenters who have me crying in to my cornflakes on a weekly basis as they grasp digital media with the same level of insight as my Nan. Instead I’d like to highlight how far we’ve come in such a short space of time – a fact that smacked me in the face when I visited my old University earlier this month for a mini-reunion (I started university in 1999 so it seemed fitting). In 2002 (my final year at Lincoln University) I regularly borrowed digital cameras from the media library, technology that appeared cutting edge at the time. This is despite the camera being the size of a hardback book and it saving the images on to a floppy disc! I don’t even know where to buy floppy discs anymore but at the time this was a vision of the future from a time where the likes of Facebook, Flickr and other photo sharing sites didn’t exist.
To emphasise the leaps we’ve made over the past ten years I’ve picked five digital changes that would have blown my mind when I began University.
Facebook: When I started at Lincoln the best way to keep in touch with friends was through mobile phones (with awfully expensive contracts) and MSN messenger. When I left, Mark Zuckerberg had just started attending Harvard and two years later would go on to create Facemash. Originally intended as a means to rate girls attending the prestigious American university, the site would change its name to The Facebook in 2004 and months later be known as just Facebook. The site altered its purpose and gradually opened up its doors to people not at college, university or select businesses. It wasn’t until September 26, 2006 that it would open up for everyone and become the behemoth of social media that it is today – a behemoth that in it’s current form is a little over three years old.
Google: Beginning as a research project in 1996 it would be bending the truth to say Google was a child of the decade, but there is no denying that it is arguably not only the most important digital business of the past ten years but also the biggest business success story also. In 2000 my search engine of choice was Yahoo, at this time Google had only just began selling advertising. In the years that have followed it has given us Google Earth, Street View, Google Maps, it has become a recognised verb and the most visited site on the internet.
Mobile internet: I’m at odds with the government’s desire to hook the country up to a super-fast broadband connection. While I agree that it isn’t a bad thing, I don’t believe everyone needs the proposed speeds. Going back to using the 56kbs connection I had at my student digs would be painfully slow compared to what I’m used to now, but I could still access the internet, check facebook, read the news and use other services that don’t demand a 5mbs broadband connection. But for me the biggest leap has been in how we can access the internet. In the beginning of the decade I used and soon hated WAP. It wasn’t the internet in your pocket; it wasn’t even teletext in your pocket. Now, over a 3G network I can get online pretty much anywhere, I can check emails, watch TV. In many ways I prefer using my iPhone (sorry Blackberry fans) to get online over my laptop as it is so quick and easy. In a nutshell the internet has all the information in the world (I understand that’s an exaggeration), and to have that in my pocket is the type of thing that would have blown my mind in 2000.
Twitter: Twitter is the perfect example of how far we can come in a short space of time. While Google and Facebook have their roots at the beginning of the decade work didn’t begin on Twitter until 2006 and it wasn’t until 2007 at the SXSW festival that it began to get the attention of the tech-savvy. As the decade draws to an end Twitter has changed the way news is distributed, playing a major role in the spread of news concerning the Iran elections, the spread of disgust from the Daily Mail’s Stephen Gatley editorial and the spread of frustration at the Guardian being banned from covering the Trafigura case. While Twitter can be regarded as a modern online invention it has its roots in SMS which in 2000 were still relatively new themselves.
YouTube
This list wouldn’t work without YouTube and while the past ten years have proved to be a watershed decade for the internet, the video sharing site shows that you don’t need the full ten, five will do. The first YouTube video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, by founder Jawed Karim and by the end of the year the site was officially launched. The biggest testament on how far we have come between 1999 and 2009 is the statistic that in 2007 YouTube is estimated to have consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet in 2000.
What will happen over the next ten years, that’s anyone’s guess. I’m sure if you asked the founders of Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter what the future of the internet was in 1999 they would have struggled to predict what was to come.
My guess is that innovation will continue but the biggest move will be the further seamless integration of the internet in to our everyday lives. I can’t wait.
