Defining a decade: how will 2000-2009 be remembered?

It is now roughly two months into the new decade. The 2000-2009 era is officially in the past, joining the 80s and 90s on the list of decades that I have somehow managed to survive. Like each other decade, it will be remembered for a smattering of cultural events that defined the times.

All of this begs the question: how will the first decade of the new millennium be remembered? How will people in the future even refer to this time period? Are we really going to stick with the agonizingly dull and nonspecific “the 2000s” moniker? We could go with “the zeroes.”

When looking at decades passed, we tend to recall events involving politics, music, movies, books and technology among other things. Given that, I can start to develop some idea of what people in the future are going to remember when they think about 00-09.

This decade was marked by a national tragedy at the beginning, an economic crisis toward the end and two eternally bitter wars in between (and toward the end too). On top of that, we had to watch Flavor Flav’s career deteriorate on camera.

It was of course a decade marked by technological advancement, but everything we accomplished in the past ten years will likely be trumped by what goes down in the next ten years. If 00-09 does get a reputation for its advanced technology, it won’t last long.

Thanks to the Kindle, we could be remembered as the people who sparked the match the eventually led to the end of books. But that wouldn’t be anytime soon, right? That’s distant future.

In the meantime, it’s hard to deny the outrageous success of Harry Potter and Twilight, and how much they are going to symbolize this decade.

If you go far enough down the road, it’s likely that this decade won’t be remembered for much at all. Sure it feels like we’ve done a lot of crazy stuff, but we are probably going to just continue to outdo ourselves time and time again going forward until this decade barely stands out. It was just the decade when the thirty-year war in Iraq was declared and The Simpsons started to suck.

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