When the new century dawned it was a time of massive optimism. A new century, a new start and lots to look forward to particularly as the technological age kicked into overdrive. We’d survived the Millienium Bug, and the dawn of the internet was well and truly upon us.
We’d had the 80’s with their years of despair, excess and big hair. We’d had the 90’s full of colour, brit pop and technology. Now we had, erm what do we call it??? Let’s go for the 00’s, the noughties, genius.
Perhaps looking back on the decade that was ‘the noughies’ (yes it has already been and gone) could it be said that we went for the wrong spelling, would ‘The Naughties’ be more appropriate?
Without wanting to make light of the current News of the World scandal, it comes on the back of the financial markets scandal and the MP’s expenses scandal. These are three huge stories and three events that may well define the decade in years to come. All three, it can be argued, triggered by corruption, greed and seeming sense of indestructibility, and all born during what could be the naughtiest decade of them all.
It may not be as straightforward as a case of greed as you may imagine. Though underlying the whole decade up to the crash and credit crunch of 2007 was an unprecedented period of economic growth throughout the country. Consumer spending rocketed, ease of credit, an unseemly obsession with celebrity and all its trappings, a public sector investing and bloating to huge proportions all contributed to and were outcomes of an economy that drove a new wave of greed.
At the same time this was occurring we saw the birth and explosive growth of a new media, a social media surfing the rise and rise of the internet. It gave us access to the breadth and depth of information we’d never had before, well not without spending months in a public library. In every house, in every pocket we now had the ability to find out pretty much everything there was to know about any subject, person or place. It also gave us access to information and people we could previously never have thought possible. It allowed us to communicate like never before, and it changed the way we wanted our information and the way we consumed our information. Suddenly waiting 24 hours or even 12 hours for news stories was no longer good enough when it was happening in front of our eyes. Public opinion was no longer the domain of the newspaper editors and tv presenters, we only had to press a button and we could see it. And that isn’t a bad thing.
What it did do was help fuel a culture of wanting everything now. Why wait a week, year, working life for your ‘material’ dreams to come true, when you can get it now. It was and is, I would argue, this driver that drove ‘the noughties’ to become ‘the naughties’. The financial markets, stupidly freed of red tape found new ways of making money for themselves and hungry clients and companies. MP’s, forgetting they were the servants of the state and lining their pockets. Finally, news rooms and newspaper desks across the country, driven by harder and harder revenue targets, celebrity status and an uncertain ‘new media’ future taking horrific, stupid and appalling decisions to get stories at any price, both morally and financially. All three born in a decade that should’ve been about the future, taking the world forward together into a new century instead it turned into a binge drinking night out in Oldham.
Yes we have so much to be thankful for in ‘The Noughties’, and they won’t be forgotten, but there is no getting away from the fact that the last decade really was ‘The Naughties’. As Robbie Williams sung in a now prophetic way in his song Millenium… “We all enjoy the madness, coz we know it’s gonna fade away’.
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