PAST DECADE NO WHIRLWIND BUT THAT’S ABOUT TO CHANGE
MAYBE it’s a function of age but what was surprising to me about reading the obituaries for the decade just ended was how little the world changed since 2010.
Perhaps historians in the future will be able to find some great turning point in the past 10 years but although we have got used to repeating the mantra that we are living through a period of rapid historical change, it seems to me that less happened in the past decade that has made a real difference to people’s lives than in any other decade in my lifetime.
Imagine you were a journalist in 1980 tasked with summing up the decade just ended. Space would barely allow to list all the things that had happened.
The Vietnam had ended in defeat of for the United States and its Australian ally. In just three years between 1972 and 1975, the Whitlam government had increased public authority expenditure from 32 per cent of GDP to 39 per cent. Free university education had been introduced.
Women had been given equal pay – in theory anyway. Abortion become available if not actually decriminalised. The rise of the gay rights movement had led to the first moves do decriminalise homosexuality. Colour television and FM radio had arrived, as had the first VCRs.
The changes between 1980 and 1990 were in some ways even more radical. Medicare was created. The dollar was floated, banks deregulated. The tariff walls behind which much of Australian industry had been sheltered were being dismantled and centralised wage fixing had been abandoned. Mobile phones had made their first appearances.
The 1990s of course saw the coming of the internet with all the change that has entailed, along with the introduction of the GST.
The pace of change picked up in the next decade with the arrival of the smart phone and social media in the form of Facebook and Twitter.
That decade saw massive changes, too, in our relationship with the state as governments enacted national security legislation in the wake of September 11, attacks in New York and Washington and the rise of Islamic terrorism.
What’s changed so much in the past decade? In 2010 Australian troops were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. A decade later they’re still there, albeit in fewer numbers.
Two of the top political issues then were climate change and border protection. That hasn’t changed either. True, the carbon tax came and went but you wouldn’t want to bet that some form of carbon emissions trading scheme or tax won’t be back in the future, not least because of the disaster currently unfolding across eastern Australia.
None of this is to meant to downplay the important social and legislative changes of the past 10 years, but aside from the enactment of same sex marriage and the rise of the MeToo movement, it is difficult to argue the world in our daily lives is that different in 2020 from how it was in 2010 – aside from huge improvements in our ability to treat lung cancer and melanoma.
Sure, there are more young men with beards than there were 10 years ago and nowadays you can pretty much get though life without owning a tie but are things really that different? Even the impact of the internet seems to have slowed.
In the past decade the coming of Netflix and Spotify changed the way we consume TV and music and Instagram led to an epidemic of narcissism; but I would argue they’re small beer compared with the impact of email and online news services in the 1990s.
The question is, will things go on like this or is the pace of change about to pick up?
I suspect the answer is yes and that the future historians I imagined earlier will look back at the past decade as a pause before history started speeding up again.
The engine for this change will be the coming of age of the first generation of adults who have no recollection of the world before social media shredded the power of newspapers, radio and television to create the agreed-upon-set-of-facts within which public debate was conducted.
It has become a cliche in recent years that “Twitter is not the real world” – that is to say it doesn’t reflect the opinions of the vast majority of people, as was shown by the election result last May.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Twitter, and more importantly Facebook, reflect the reality in which more and more people live. And if you spend any time trawling through the opinions that are expressed in those places it pretty quickly becomes clear that as far as politics goes, people are now living in a sort of choose-your-own adventure story in which facts can be selected at will.
That strikes me as a recipe for trouble as the generations that remember an earlier world start to shuffle off their mortal coil. Happy New Year!