Prompted by all the commencements making the news.
Pre-2006:
- End of the Cold War and the USSR
- 9/11, the war on terror, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan
- Cell phones, laptops, public GPS, WiFI
- The internet, Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit
- Public awareness of global warming
Post-2006:
- 2008 financial crisis
- Smart phones
- TikTok, Instagram, Netflix
- Covid-19
- LLMs, generative AI
I’m sure I’m overlooking some things, but the pre-2006 decades seem like a more drastic change overall.
All of the pairs of decades going back to 1906 have been a bigger swing than than 2006-26. This century seems on track to be a bit more like the 19th, in terms of social change.
Edit: Although, Those platforms were all brand new, and Reddit didn’t really take off at all until Digg died years later. The basic ideas existed, but they weren’t a part of everyday life yet.
Politics has shifted way more on this side of 2006, as well.
Major effects of climate change happened post-2006
Eh. We have forest fire smoke season where I live now, as well as more extreme or hot weather, but it’s a pretty subtle shift compared to the internet appearing. At least so far.
Smartphones were 100% around before 2006, FYI Even some of the “dumb” phones (like the OG Razr) could browse the web, take pictures/video, watch TV, etc. They were just becoming increasingly commonplace as the costs went down.
On a related note, Apple did not invent the smartphone. They just happened to become the first really popular one, thanks mostly to marketing, because the OG iPhone was garbage (it couldn’t even copy and paste) especially compared to Android and WebOS (or even Windows, BlackberryOS, or Garnett - which didn’t look pretty but were more capable than iOS at the time).
It only got good after it stole a ton of features and designs from Android and WebOS (which was a wildly underrated mobile OS that is more or less, what all modern smartphone homescreen interfaces are based on, in fact Android hired the guy who made WebOS’s UI to fix up Android’s interface, which Apple largely copied). Unfortunately for WebOS, it was horribly mismanaged and a real mess on the back end because of said mismanagement, making it a pain in the ass to develop for (meaning, there weren’t many apps).
The tech stuff on your pre-2006 list brings to mind the phrase “The future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed yet.”
Those things technically existed, a few of them were in their infancy, but for the most part they hadn’t reshaped society yet.
1986 to 2006 is a massive leap as far as LGBTQIA+ rights an even as far as recognizing some of those letters as actual things not to mention the whole spectrum, awareness, representation, those things have largely improved. I know it’s a bit hard to reckon with now we seem to be on a backslide but trust we’ll make it
Being gay is cool in progressive crowds now, where in 2006 it was still an insult. The pride movement came to exist at all over the 66-86 period.
I’ll go back and tell that to all the rural and suburban kids who were scared to come out in my high school in the 90s. In the cities sure that might be true, but out here not so much, you are right that the movement started much earlier though but we didn’t feel the changes here. I really don’t know what to say about it being cool or whatever, it was definitely never cool here so
Not sure if you caught that before my ninja edit or not.
Yes, of course, the trajectory has continued. For cis gay people it hasn’t really stopped improving, even, despite government efforts. All three decade pairs were transformative in their own way. From a political non-issue to a fight, from a fight to basic rights, or from basic rights to social acceptability.
Yeah, I just took it the wrong way as usual lol, I just thought in regards to the question at hand it was a bigger attitude shift from 86-06 than 06-26 but I guess it all depends on where you are talking about and all that
Even ignoring computer technology, which took a light-year leap from 1986-2006 compared to 2006-2026, the fall of the Soviet Union in late 1991 was a massive upheaval and the following years had several countries having to readapt.
Nothing of such scale has happened in the last 2 decades, though the current decay of the USA is an event of its own.
1986-2006 we lost Freddie mercury
Lemme put it this way: In 2006 we were already reading comics, listening to music, and watching video via computers and the Internet.
In 2006 there was already an “alt-right” but they called themselves “Tea Party”.
In 2006 we had Wikipedia and YouTube and cell phones and speech-to-text.
We had the internet, and we even had social media, but it wasn’t quite as pervasive as it is today.
The computers of today are far closer to 2006 than the computers of 2006 were to 1986.
From 1986 to 2006, computers were improving in capabilities so rapidly that you would have to update your hardware every other year to keep up. That more or less stopped by 2009 or so.
As someone who remembers 1986, the latter by far.
I remember back to the early 1980s. Whole different world in many ways.
Climate change, political extremism/division, and technology all made insane leaps from 2006 to 2026, as did many other things like economic inequality (in the first world anyway). Like yes, between 1986 and 2006 the Internet was invented, but between 2006 and 2026 it became an inescapable, completely integrated part of life on a worldwide scale.
China actually saw a worse growth of inequality in the same period, for what it’s worth. Not sure about the rest of the third world, although inequality was insanely bad there to start with. You might not need that caveat, it’s just a bad story all around.
I know that a lot of improvements were made to worldwide extreme poverty in the 1980-2010ish range but I’m not an expert on that so I wanted to include a disclaimer that my perspective is skewed by what I’m exposed to.
Well, there’s more than one dimension here. There’s distribution of wealth and distribution of income, as well as absolute wealth and income. Poverty itself has gone way down, globally. Poor countries are able to start exporting stuff and get way richer. Ones that really have it rough benefit from the existence of aid programs, as well.
In China specifically, things began to get super unequal starting around 2000, but the economy’s growth has been so fast it probably more than offsets it as seen by the average person. At least on the eastern side of the country.
I should point out that historically, wealth pretty reliably self-accumulates until a war breaks out. It’s not like an exclusively modern trend, either.
The former IMO and it’s not even close.
Can you elaborate why you think that?
Social media, influencers, disinformation, financial crisis, surveillance state, climate change, erosion of civility, eorsion of trusted institutions, growing monopolies, citizens united, rules based order collapse, housing crisis, wealth inequality, opioid crisis, loneliness epidemic, COVID etc. etc.
Yeah I would agree, but idk how much this is an American perspective for me. Living through the fall of the imperium makes for stiff competition. For the people disagreeing, I can’t help but feel that people are hyperfixating in the advent of new technology rather than its omnipresence and application. But hard to argue with the “end of the cold war” argument tbf.
I believe medicine and technology changed more from 2006 to 2026. I mean we practically have very effective treatments for cancer and other diseases. We were able to manufacture vaccines not too long after COVID hit. As far as technology, the evidence is obvious. Plus the move form the age of information to the age of AI. I remember learning that out future was AI in the early 2000s when I was in middle school. This is so much of an advancement. You could say medicine and technology improved exponentially so that would make the latter of the two more of a difference.
I kinda feel like the death of democracy beats everything else. In the 80’s they were worried about it; in the 2020’s they made it happen.
I’d like to know some of these commenters ages given, I have almost no personal experience to the 1986-2006 timescale and even in 2006; I was still a young child and my memories are very fuzzy. Wondering how much other young people lacking personal experience in the older time periods are allowing that to affect their judgement.
Im concerned younger people will not have perspective of how much better things will be and take the now as status quo.
