Technological Advances

When we look back on this era, it will be hard to explain to our grandchildren just how fast technology was changing our lives. This decade really began to deliver on the promise of the massive internet technology investment bubble of the late 1990s, bringing connectivity to a place that would have seemed like science fiction in 1990. Below are 10 technological innovations born of the 00’s that have changed our daily lives (note that some of this technology existed in the 90s’, but reached critical market mass this decade).

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10. Flat screen TVs & monitors – In January 2000, nobody had a plasma or LCD TV. Today damn near everyone does. One could argue that these TVs didn’t change anything; they just replaced a slightly different version of the TV. But I would argue that they are changing our lives at least aesthetically. The TV as furniture is done. The hulking entertainment cabinet as the centerpiece of a home is a thing of the past. These fantastic TVs have also changed the viewing experience. A decade ago, a 37” TV was really, really big. Today it is the smallest model Costco carries.

9. GPS + mapping sites – There is just no reason to be lost anymore. Nobody uses atlases or maps. We print up directions before we go, or we pop in our destination in our ubiquitous GPS devices.

8. Digital cameras – Over the course of this decade, the price of taking a picture went from ~$1 (film + development), to zero. This declining cost has led to an explosion in photography. Every human event is thoroughly documented in a way that would have been unfathomable a short time ago, as noted in a recent Onion article. Interestingly, as the ability to take and share photos grows, the production of physical photos has fallen off a cliff. I have shoeboxes full of pictures from college and before, but only maybe a dozen physical photos from the last 7 years. Sure hope my hard drive holds up!

7. Wikipedia – Wikipedia started out as a joke, but man, they have really turned things around. I would argue that it is the single most useful site on the internet (search engines collectively are more important, but there are several of them, and only one Wikipedia). I wasn’t thinking of including it in this list until I realized that I had looked up every one of my entries in Wikipedia. It has killed the encyclopedia outright, and it has evil designs on research libraries. Here’s a fun wiki time killer, if you are interested.

6. Facebook – Email brought down the cost of keeping up with people you don’t see every day. A lot of us still have high school friends we would have lost touch with in an era of letter writing. But keeping up via email still has a cost. You need to compose a message, get the right email address, etc. Facebook dropped the cost of keeping tabs on people down to zero. Kids today will need to opt out of keeping up with their high school friends. The concept of whittling down one’s social circle as life progresses – a constant feature of civilization for the last 5,000 years – will cease to be.

5. TiVo – Remember trying to be home at a specific time to catch your favorite show? As recently as 2004, I was scheduling my graduate school classes so I could catch the 5pm Simpsons reruns. TiVo has made that a thing of the past. Good riddance!

4. Wireless internet – As the importance of the internet grew in the 1990’s, the usefulness of the laptop computer diminished. What’s the point of having a mobile computer if it had to be tethered to your network to be at all useful? Nowadays, we just assume every café, airport, hotel and strip club has wireless available. At the end of this decade, it’s the desktop computer that is looking more and more obsolete.

3. Home broadband connection – Remember that terrible shrieking sound your modem made when it connected to your ISP? Remember the per-minute charges? Can you believe that was just 8 years ago? Installing the capacity to bring broadband internet access into every home nearly took down the entire telecom industry, and it certainly bankrupted a number of its biggest names. But the result was worth it. Bringing the internet in all of its glory into every middle class home has really unlocked its potential, allowing everything else on this list to flourish.

2. Smart phones – Man, what can’t these things do? They have truly turned the 10-hour worker into the 24-hour worker, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective, but definitely a different thing. It has made escaping work harder and less tolerated, but it has also made escaping the physical office much, much easier, for which I love my Blackberry dearly. To grasp its importance, 25 minutes of downtime of a device that didn’t exist 10 years ago now makes the front page of the NYTimes.

1. The Segway - Do any of us even remember life before the Segway?

And now a few things that get a lot of talk, but did not warrant a top-10 placement on my list

Google – It’s a search engine. Yes, we use it every day, but before we used Google, we used Yahoo, and before we used Yahoo, we used Alta Vista. Whatever algorithmic advantages it may have over its competitors doesn’t mean much to the casual search engine user.

Ipod – I had a walkman that a rarely used. After that, I had a discman that I rarely used. Now I have an Ipod that I rarely use. The concept of carrying music around with you has been around for 25 years. Yes, the Ipod made it easier to carry much, much more music, but there is a very finite amount of music one can actually consume on the go. The Ipod changed nothing and doesn’t deserve a spot here.

DVDs – No consumer product has ever taken off as quickly as the DVD player. But I am not sure it changed our lives very much. I use DVDs exactly as I used VHS tapes – to watch movies and occasionally to use as a coaster.

Net Flix – This almost made the list. It has singlehandedly made the phrase “going to the video store” as obsolete as “going to the soda fountain.” Let's call it #11.