Walkie talkie

A few months before the Noughties began, I was walking down Las Ramblas in Barcelona with my then boss, and he started talking and chuckling to himself, then shouting in French. I really thought he’d gone mad, until I realised he had one of those new-fangled hands-free, in-ear phone thingies; the first time I’d ever seen one. (Or not seen one, which is part of their appeal, I suppose.)

Then, 10 years on, a few months before the Noughties ended, I was in Marks & Spencer in Croydon when I saw a man coming down the escalator, talking to himself. I presumed he had one of those by-now-tediously-ubiquitous hands-free, in-ear phone thingies; and then I realised, no, he was just mad.

That, I think, goes part of the way to summing up the decade. Not my journey from Barcelona to Croydon (there’s another tale entirely) but the extent to which things that so recently were startling, almost uncanny, have so quickly become ordinary, unremarkable. And how often we forget the people who get lost down the cracks that those changes leave behind.

And as the Noughties finally trundles towards oblivion, it would seem a good time to bid farewell, although I may pop up with a few relevant nuggets in the coming months; for one thing I’ll almost certainly be nagging you to watch BBC2’s History of Now, which begins next week. If you’ve purchased my book, thank you, and if you’ve read it, even better. Why not tell us what you thought of it, either here, or at Amazon, Waterstone’s, Book Depository or the like? If you haven’t yet done so, from tomorrow you’ll have the perfect perspective from which to tell me how utterly wrong I really was about the decade, since it will finally have made the transition from Current Affairs to History. I always intended the book not to be a definitive statement, but the opening salvo in a debate, an argument, a conversation.

Over to you.

PS3 I love you

Of course, these Best-of-the-Noughties lists aren’t all cooked up by a tiny cabal of substance-snuffling hacks you know. Sometimes there’s a semblance of democracy, as with The Guardian’s request for your Game of the Decade. Anyone for Facebook Scrabble?

PS: And the American Dialect Society is taking suggestions for its Word of the Decade.

Not with a bang but with a beeper

Wikileaks has published the content of 500,000 pager messages sent on September 11, 2001. On 9/11, most of us wouldn’t have been able to get our heads around an idea such as Wikileaks. Now, at the end of the decade, some of us probably can’t get our heads around pagers. What other facets of the early part of the Noughties now seem quaint or even inconceivable to a child growing up at the end of the decade? Record shops? Terrestrial TV? One or two politicians you might trust with your wallet? (And on the subject of 9/11, can I just offer one more plug for what might just be the best novel of the decade, Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World? I just did, anyway.)

The Nene meme

A Japanese man has married a video game character. It’s a definitively Noughties story however you look at it. Either it sums up the extent to which many people exist in a state utterly divorced from ‘reality’ as most of use would define it; or it’s a classic case of the way respectable media organisations, lacking both time and resources, now pick up commercial stunts and virals masquerading as news and regurgitate them without even cursory fact checks. With a dlightly patronising side order of “only in Japan!”, of course.

Lil communication

In Chapter Eight of The Noughties, I suggested that Lily Allen, above any other musician, was able to encapsulate the decade, both with the multi-platform nature of her rise to fame, and the uneasy combination of rampant consumerism and creeping paranoia that permeates her 2008 hit ‘The Fear’.

But now she claims to have moved on, giving up MySpace, Twitter, even YouTube. “I’ve thrown away my laptop,” she says. “I haven’t got a Blackberry and I listen to records. It’s amazing.”

Records, eh? I remember them. The question is, has she stepped back to the analogue Nineties; or simply defined a new agenda for the Teens?

Rewriting the script

Not so much a Noughties story, more one for the teens and onwards: Icann’s decision to allow non-Latin web addresses will at a stroke shift the global balance of power to what we still call the developing world. The next question is: at what point will English cease to be the default global language? See Chapter Nine.

Here’s looking at you

Chapter Six of The Noughties deals with the surveillance culture that pervaded the decade, usually justified with the homily “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear.” The weirdest development was the extent to which the distinction between private and public space became confused; and people seemed delighted to offer themselves up for intimate scrutiny in the name of fortune and fame.

Now, entertainment and money meet invasion of privacy once again in the form of Internet Eyes, a game of sorts, that streams live CCTV footage to the home computers of players. Spot a crime being committed, and win £1,000. Michael Laurie of Crimestoppers is unimpressed: “While the motive may be sound, the concept of Internet Eyes seems to ask more questions than it answers,” he says.

Yesterday’s news

There’s no doubt that the new media developments of the Noughties have presented a serious challenge to the dominance – and in many cases, the survival – of old-school newspapers, TV and so on. But at the same time, the fresh-faced upstarts, blogs, Twitter and so on, often seem to yearn from the patina of respectability that the BBC and the New York Times still possess, even if fewer people are watching/reading them.

For example, Twitter Tim.es, which takes the content from your Twitter account and makes it look like a newspaper. It’s as if Henry Ford had launched the Model T, and offered a free horse with each car.

Also on the Noughties/Twitter interface, here’s Noughtiesclock, counting down to the end of the decade; by which point, will we have decided what the next one’s going to be called? I’m still pitching for ‘The Teens’. You?

Like iTunes never happened

More Noughties music stuff. Uncut magazine offers its 150 albums of the decade, without really reflecting on the fact that the Noughties saw ‘The Album’ as a product becoming increasingly less important. As I discuss in Chapter Eight, the most significant music story of the period has not been any one particular release, but the changing means of distribution, most of which parcel up music as discrete tracks. Even if you buy an album these days, how often to you listen to it from beginning to end, in the order the artist intended? The question is not whether the Uncut people have made the right choice, but whether the whole idea of a list of best albums is relevant any more.

Anyway, here’s Uncut’s Top 10:

1. The White Stripes, White Blood Cells
2. Bob Dylan, Love And Theft
3. Wilco, A Ghost Is Born
4. Brian Wilson, Smile
5. The Strokes, Is This It
6. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Raising Sand
7. The Arcade Fire, Funeral
8. Bob Dylan, Modern Times
9. Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker
10. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes