Everyone else is making Best of 2005 top 10 lists, so here’s a quick list of Top 10 ways in which technology has impacted our culture during 2005, in no particular order. I didn’t check any other writer’s lists, so I probably missed some big ones.
1. The edges gain power. From the video and music worlds to politics and culture, power is increasingly flowing away from the media, from the political elites and from the corporate suits and into the hands of ordinary users who are collectively wielding more influence in all walks of life, mostly thanks to the Internet. The forces of freedom are steadily chipping away at the power of the forces of control. It’s pure beauty.
2. Citizens media takes off. Few amateurs are creating citizen journalism, but millions of us are creating our own messy, democratic works — photos, video, audio — and a lot of it is astonishingly good. The introduction of devices like the video iPod will propel citizens media into millions of more homes, while traditional, force-fed, top-down, linear Big Media programming and content continues to falter.
3. The rise of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is not just a nickname for all the new stuff happening on the Web these days. It’s a catchphrase for the Web as a platform, with dozens of startups and more mature companies getting into the act of creating Web services that let you accomplish things online instead of depending on old-fashioned software loaded onto your hard drive. It’s all moving online, baby.
4. Google grows into a collossus. A year ago, Google was a terrific search engine. Now it has risen to the ranks of one of the most powerful business forces on the planet. Gmail, Google Earth and Google Maps are only a sampling of its potential impact on the culture.
5. Skype hits 50 million users. Its multibillion-dollar purchase by eBay aside, Skype is singlehandedly deep-sixing the wires-and-switches telecommunications business and transforming us into a ubiquitous, always-on communication hive.
6. Social media become a force. Community sites like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and Buzznet gained success and prominence on the strength of social networking, tagging and other tools that promoted the idea of media as a conversation.
7. Cell phones get smart. It’s been happening for years, but 2005 was the year in which mobile phones finally integrated photography, video and texting successfully, making these converged devices ubiquitous and useful.
8. Print’s decline accelerates. We thought it would take many years, but newspaper circulation is plummeting and magazine revenue is stagnating as more readers — and advertisers — turn to the online medium. Craigslist, in particular, has become a major beneficiary of users’ shifting loyalties in the classifieds marketplace.
9. Podcasting becomes a movement. In the fall of 2004, podcasting was still a novelty practiced by a handful of hobbyists. Now it’s a full-blown movement, with thousands of people creating downloadable audio programs and millions of subscriptions via RSS. Podcasting easily outshines the drivel you hear on commercial radio.
10. The power of goodwill. Thanks to online fundraising efforts, relief agencies raised record donations for victims of the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.
Honorable mention: Blogging gets big. Yes, blogging already made its impact with the 2004 election, if not before, but blogging achieved mainstream status in 2005 by dint of sheer numbers (over 24 million blogs today) and by its rising up alongside mainstream media as an influential part of the public’s media diet. Between blogging, Google Earth, and sites like MySpace, Flickr and Facebook, we’re continuing to see a steady erosion of traditional notions of privacy.
J.D. Lasica is co-founder of Ourmedia, author of four weblogs, and was a contributing editor for Engadget during most of 2005.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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JD Lasica offers up his list of the top ten tech transformations of 2005. The first: “1) The edges gain power. From the video and music worlds to politics and culture, power is increasingly flowing away from the media,…
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