Truthfully, I didn’t realize that the decade was ending until Time Magazine informed me that this was the worst decade ever. I was under the impression that 2010 was the end of the decade not 2009. Wasn’t there a Seinfeld episode along these lines?

While Worst Decade Ever sounds like a VH1 special with Michael Ian Black, I don’t think it was that terrible. America faced a number of challenges, and only time will tell if we made the right decisions.

This decade, which I never quite figured out what to call, had a lot of terrible things happen, but positives did emerge. I think that historians will define the Industrial Revolution ending and the Technological/Information Revolution beginning at some point.

The 2000s were the decade in which I became an adult and went through all of the proverbial twentysomething experiences. In 2000, I graduated from high school, moved away to college and voted in my first presidential election. 2000 could be seen as an omen for a decade of divisive politics. I’ll always remember the cheer that erupted at the Knox County GOP party when Al Gore lost his home state. I’m still proud of that vote.

Technology and terrorism are the two takeaways of this decade. In 2000, I was shocked to fill up my 1 gig Gateway computer with songs downloaded from Napster. Those were the days when file-sharing was still murky. I would sit in class, writing playlists in the margin of my notes, and go back to the T1 line in my dorm room to download anything I wanted. Now, I have a $10 USB drive that has twice the memory of that computer and is the size of a band aid. It also cost a fraction of the Gateway desktop. Are Gateways even around anymore?

I never thought that I’d buy my last CD in 2005 with Coldplay’s XY? Who anticipated that we’d need iPods with hundreds of gigs in order to carry around every song ever recorded? I wonder if 20 years from now the Surgeon General will release a report detailing how headphones are causing generations to prematurely lose their hearing. It can’t be healthy.

When I got my first cell phone in 1999, I never thought that it could one day double as a computer. My Sprint Quaalcom was only analog and had a battery life of 3 hours. I kept it off and only used it for emergencies since I had about 1 hour of minutes per month. It was huge and would never die. Since it could also double as a self-defense weapon, I named it Mr. Clunky.

Social media wasn’t even a concept, and only a few nerds were blogging. Crazy to think that the technologies that have changed our society weren’t around ten years ago. My career field didn’t even exist when I graduated from college in 2004 and was just emerging when I got my master’s in 2007. When I wrote my thesis on social media there weren’t any academic texts to use. My adviser looked at me and said, “You’re on your own here.”

It’s been 10 years of huge changes in culture, society, economic and technology. A new generation entered the workforce, and 9/11 forever changed our way of life. Yes, it was a decade of challenges, but I’m hopeful that we can face those as a nation and be better for it.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama pledged to have the most transparent administration ever. This was one of the first promises he broke by not posting bills to the web for a full five days before he signed them.

It appears, he is also not as transparent with his digital media prowess as the administration claimed:

Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. I noticed that young people — they’re very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.

Is this a major deal? Kind of. When you run your campaign on the premise that you’re the most amazing thing to happen to the Internet since Al Gore, you open yourself to criticism in the future, especially when your campaign was lauded for being an early adopter of the technology in question.

Sarah Granger at TechPresident opines:

Meanwhile, I expect we’ll see more hoopla about Barack Obama not using Twitter, even though his campaign never asserted that he did himself. So far about half of the follow-up tweets on the #obamacn hashtag are RT’s about the admission and the other half is people responding that they never thought he was tweeting. Are 50% of Twitter users really that surprised?

Yep, actually Sarah we are surprised. For a number of reasons.

First, remember all of the media attention about Obama refusing to give up his BlackBerry and the NSA having to build a super-deluxe-ultimately-secure version of software? That kind of negates Obama’s comment about thumbs and makes you question if he fully understand exactly what Twitter is. If you are addicted to a BlackBerry, how do you not have the skills to tweet? Same device and skill set. It’s also possible to use Twitter on a computer. Tweetdeck anyone?

Secondly, as James Richardson at RedState recalls, the Obama team released an add attacking McCain for not using technology. While the McCain camp deserved to be flogged for their lack of enagaging the interwebs, John McCain actually tweets every day. As Top of the Ticket points out, he has nearly 1.6 million followers. RedState notes:

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