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Tim Footman: Terror, technology and a new dawn of dread in the decade still searching for an identity
WHAT were the 1960s like? Even if you weren't around, you probably have an image of the decade a fast-moving montage of mini-skirts and hippies, Vietnam and the Moon landings. The 1970s? Flared trousers, punk rock and picket lines. The 1980s? Shoulder-pads and the Berlin Wall.
But after that, it all gets a bit fuzzy, as if you're standing too close to a painting and can only see the brush strokes. How will the current decade be remembered?
For a start, we're slightly hampered by the fact that we can't even decide what to call it.
The zeroes? The 2000s? The Noughties? It's as if we were so focused on the changeover to the new millennium, the combination of religious apocalypse and technological chaos (not to mention the Dome) that we never really considered what we'd do when we got there.
We found out soon enough: the attacks of September 11, 2001 set the political agenda for the rest of the decade, and offered images as resonant as the napalm scarred Vietnamese girl or Neil Armstrong on the Moon. It was a classic "where-were-you?" moment, to compare with the Kennedy assassination or the death of Princess Diana.
And the events of that day set the tone for the rest of the decade, a feeling of unease, a nagging worry that any day now we, too, would be caught up in something similar a worry which came to terrifying fruition in July 2005.
It was a pervasive sense of dread that we thought we'd left behind with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But there was a key difference between the War on Terror and the Cold War, and that was in the way we experienced it. We can place the key events of the Noughties by the developing technology that brought us the news.
Most of the footage of 9/11 came from TV stations, but we also remember the mobile phone messages of those trapped in the Towers. Four years later, witnesses could use the same devices to record the images of
people staggering out from mangled Tube trains.
And the unfolding horror of the Mumbai attacks, in 2008, was tracked by another new medium, Twitter. 9/11 was a creature of CNN and the mainstream media, but the years that followed were thrown open to bloggers, Tweeters and YouTubers.
The two themes of the decade were fear and technology, and the places where they intersected; it could be argued that the defining image of the Noughties is the swivelling gaze of a CCTV camera.
Of course, it wasn't a decade of unabated gloom. This was also the era that gave us iPods and e-books, the reborn Dr Who and the relentless Harry Potter, two Ashes victories and a trunkful of Olympic gold.
Reality TV and celebrity culture may not have been quite so universally admired, but at least the increasingly deranged antics of their protagonists distracted us from worries about terrorism, Iraq, the environment and, towards the end of the decade, financial meltdown.
When Gordon Brown expressed concern for the wellbeing of Susan Boyle – a phenomenon created not so much by TV, but by the global power of YouTube – he was roundly derided, but to be honest, we only had ourselves to blame for our part in the process.
So how will the Noughties be remembered? Probably inaccurately, as has been the case with most decades.
Most people in the Sixties didn't wear mini-skirts, didn't take drugs, didn't tune in, turn on or drop out. And most of us in the Noughties didn't, thank God, get caught up in terrorist outrages, or appear on
reality TV.
But I have a hunch that the image we retain of the Noughties will be closer to reality, simply because so many more people will have had their voices heard.
As 1999 drew to a close, we were told – by the BBC or CNN, by the New York Times or the Yorkshire Post – what we had experienced.
Ten years later, there's a cacophony of voices, from bedroom bloggers and Tweeters and Wikipedists, to the motley crew taking turns on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. Fair enough, many of them are talking rubbish. But that doesn't matter it's their rubbish.
When, in 2006, Time magazine selected "You" as the Person of the Year, it signalled a fundamental change in the way information was gathered, interpreted and transmitted. Anyone with a phone or a computer now had a chance to be heard.
And that may turn out to be how the Noughties will be remembered – not for any single big event, but for a fundamental shift in the way we discuss such events.
I've written a book about the decade, but I know that it offers
my perspective, my version of events. You may agree with me wholeheartedly, or you may cast the book across the room, because there's too much about Lily Allen or not enough about Leeds United. Fair enough. You can make your views known.
This is my Noughties: tell me yours.
n To order a copy of The Noughties by Tim Footman from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.
Tim Footman is the author of The Noughties, A Decade that changed the World 2000-2009, which is published by Crimson Publishing, price 8.99.
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