Sydney Australia celebrates on January 1 2000 People around the world celebrated the start of a new millennium with optimism about the future but few could have foreseen the changes that would come in society and culture What were they waiting for Was it a rare appearance by a film or music star or a scramble for tickets to a one-off show or sporting event that they could not possibly miss The fact that many were clutching laptop computers gave passersby a clue These people were waiting for the launch of the iPhone the latest must-have gadget from Apple They had to get there ahead of everyone else even though the phone would be widely available and over the following years millions would be sold In the twenty-first century gadgets like the iPhone have become part of pop culture Just like reading the latest best-selling book or seeing the current blockbuster film many people seek to own the latest technology Pop or popular culture includes anything that is designed to entertain or enrich the lives of as many people as possible Pop culture includes films music magazines and even advertisements Even the design styles of products such as cars and mobile phones can be part of pop culture because they are produced to appeal to people as being desirable as well as useful objects Time of change The early twenty-first century has seen massive changes to popular culture with the Internet revolutionizing music books
and the way people interact creating whole new forms of pop culture and ways of making it instantly available to millions of people Many of these changes began in the 1990s but the pace of change was even more astonishing in the first decade of the new millennium The Internet explosion Internet use increased dramatically around the world after the year 2000 In 2000 only about 6 percent of the world’s people were Internet users In 2011 the figure was 30 percent The change in some regions of the world was even more dramatic More than half of the Internet users in 2000 were in North America and Europe In 2011 there were almost one billion people online in Asia making up almost half of the total 2 The way people used the Internet also changed More people had high-speed and wireless connections so they could be online at any time anywhere in the world
A Turbulent Decade Pop culture reflects what is happening in society at the time it is made The year 2000 started with a wave of optimism Much of the world was nearing the peak of a dot-com boom as the Internet became part of everyday life This optimism started to fade in the second half of 2000 when many Internet companies started to fail It was brought to a shattering end on September 11 2001 when radical Islamist terrorists hijacked four passenger jets crashing two of them into New York’s World Trade Center another into the Pentagon building near Washington D C and a fourth in a field in Pennsylvania Almost 3,000 people died in the attacks 1 War on terror U S president George W Bush vowed to pursue a war on terror to defeat terrorists U S troops began an invasion of Afghanistan where the Taliban government was sheltering Osama Bin Laden and other leaders of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization The United States was supported by the United Kingdom and other allies who were appalled by the attacks The war continued for more than a decade even after the killing of Bin Laden by U S forces in 2011
While the war in Afghanistan was seen as a direct consequence of the 9 11 attacks Bush’s next war to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was much less popular People questioned the reasons for the war and whether it was legal The war also provoked more terrorist attacks particularly on the people of Iraq but also on the streets of international cities such as London and Madrid These wars and terrorism were themes of a lot of pop culture during this period Financial crash Despite the threat of war and terrorism economies continued to boom Homeowners in prosperous Western countries felt they were better off as prices of property rose and bankers in the big financial centers such as Wall Street and the City of London were taking home million-dollar bonuses When it became clear from 2007 onward that many of these bonuses were based on lending money to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back the financial system crashed and the world was plunged into economic crisis At the end of the decade U S voters elected the first African American president He took over a country at war and in economic crisis but Barack Obama’s election was still seen by some as the culmination of a struggle for racial equality that had been a feature of much of twentieth-century culture
