Browsing the internet today has led me to the conclusion not only do the media love summing up the decade in top ten lists, but across those lists there appears to be one constant – social media, or to generalise further, the internet.
I don’t want to use this blog to state the obvious and regurgitate phrases like ‘the internet has changed the way we communicate’. That kind of comment is best reserved for the BBC Breakfast presenters who have me crying in to my cornflakes on a weekly basis as they grasp digital media with the same level of insight as my Nan. Instead I’d like to highlight how far we’ve come in such a short space of time – a fact that smacked me in the face when I visited my old University earlier this month for a mini-reunion (I started university in 1999 so it seemed fitting). In 2002 (my final year at Lincoln University) I regularly borrowed digital cameras from the media library, technology that appeared cutting edge at the time. This is despite the camera being the size of a hardback book and it saving the images on to a floppy disc! I don’t even know where to buy floppy discs anymore but at the time this was a vision of the future from a time where the likes of Facebook, Flickr and other photo sharing sites didn’t exist.
