Context Between diseases, economic troubles, violence, and new ways of self-expression, the 2000s have been a time of change. Globalization has played a major role into the events of the decade. A great deal of the manufacturing of consumer goods has been outsourced from domestic to foreign areas so that companies can achieve the highest profits possible. While this may be a negative result of globalization for countries losing work, the number of opportunities one can find in life seem limitless thanks to the immense scope of the working market, and seem to show a benefit to the intense relationships the world shares. The various wars that have been fought in the 2000s have created discontent of the people with their governments and also have in part increased the threat of terrorism across the western world.
Social Networks The site Friendster, released in 2002, is one of the first 'social networks,' and was one of many attempts at that idea. The next year LinkedIn and MySpace were released and were largely popular for years. The 'king' of the social networks indisputably Facebook, with its more than 1.3 billion users. As Facebook and Twitter became the most popular social networks, the rise of the modern smartphone opened up the markets for services such as Instagram and Snapchat, especially among teenagers. Despite competition between all of these popular services, they are continuing to have great success as such a relatively new concept. There is much to debate over the effects of social networks and how they will continue to evolve as technology becomes evermore intertwined in our every-day lives.
Timeline Increasing global inter-connectivity due to the Internet and commercial travel Hybrid vehicles VOIP allows people to speak across the internet, video calling follows same idea, notable in Skype (2003) 2000 - DVRs introduced, eventually replace the VCR 2000 - Bluetooth introduced 2000 - AT&T introduced text messaging 2000-2002 - "dot com" bust 2001 - Wikipedia is launched 2004 - Facebook 2004 - Google 2005 - Youtube 2006- Nintendo launches the Wii, revolutionizes the video game market 2007 - The iPhone is released 2008 - Start of the Great Recession 2010 - Instagram is released 2010s - Virtual and Augmented reality begin to gain popularity 2011 - Snapchat is released 2012 - Google's driverless cars
Evaluation Since the start of the new millennium, the world has changed immensely. Social media networks have, for the good and bad, brought together millions of people around the world, schools have integrated technology into their curriculum, and life as a whole has become more and more cyclical. The new free-running markets of the internet and care-free consumers and business led to various market crashes (dot com burst and the housing crash) ultimately resulting in dire economic conditions and debt which are still felt nearly after 10 years.