Technology Rampant

Handsets got smaller. Prices dropped and mobile phones began to proliferate. The big telecommunications companies grew in power and influence. Texting caught on, introducing a whl nu vocblry of truncated grunts to our daily lives. Predictive text made it easier (but the diehards clung onto the nu spk). Romances began and, more controversially, ended with texts and increasingly people hid behind them and behind that other escalating phenomenon of the noughties: email. Phones turned into cameras and pictures went flying through the ether. Much was gained from these new means of communication, of course, but something too was lost: some of us forgot how to pick up the phone and talk and an elementary form of courtesy was widely abandoned.
Online, the advent of Bebo, MySpace (remember those?), and of course the big F wrought its own mini revolution. Sat by a computer, you were never further than a mouse click away from discovering what your friends had been up to. It wasn’t always sensible or edifying. Emulating the likes of Paris Hilton (where is she now?) but without the family fortune to carry it off, everyone was a celebrity in their own tiny circle and thousands behaved as stupidly as celebrities often do.
Laptops made it possible to take the internet with you. And then they worked out to make the web accessible on mobile phones. For many it was a boon. For others it meant that there really was no rest for the wicked. Furthermore, towards the end of the decade – like a glazed cherry on the top of a fairy cake – social networking junkies had another device at their disposal in the shape of Twitter, which gave you the option of relaying the details of your life in convenient mini updates.
On the music front, the biggest change in the way we consume music was wrought by the invention of the iPod. A masterpiece of design, Apple’s innovation put paid to the days of lugging around CDs in your bag, and effectively served as a mobile record collection. It threw up some fascinating questions about music – was the era of the complete album listening experience now over? And, for that matter, did it spell the end of those days when you had three or four bands you followed religiously? After all, there was no easier way to skip a duff track than to check out the act that came next in alphabetical order.
The rise of internet usage also resulted in music becoming more freely available than ever. Here, highly contentious issues surfaced about illegal file-sharing, copyright theft and musicians being paid fairly for their work. Even within the legal arena, on iTunes whose parent Apple hammered out agreements with record companies relatively early, the sheer wealth of material available was manna from heaven for completists (we now no longer have to search for months or even years for that obscure track!). But the hackers had a field day nonetheless, and as illegal downloading gained a foothold, you had to ask: at what cost to the artist was music now so freely available?
And so to a new next decade, in which the widespread consumption of books in electronic form could be on the cards – so perhaps we should ready ourselves for a wave of Flaubert and Dostoevsky bootlegs...