Happy New Year! This week is an opportunity to ponder decade-long trend arcs and make grandiose pronouncements of what the last ten years were “about,” and I’ll gladly indulge. During the holidays, I usually watch more movies and TV shows than I do the entire rest of the year (time I’d otherwise spend reading tweets), so I’m particularly attuned to the meteoric rise of Netflix this decade, which I’ll come back to soon. At a glance, however, this was the mobile decade: In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than in the prior three years of the device’s existence combined, and acquiring one marked the dawn of the decade for many of us. Back then, the iPhone seemed like a mechanism for getting us out of the house and living more of our lives in public. Not only did smartphones let us accomplish mundane tasks like replying to emails without running home to our desktops, they transformed our relationship to the urban environment with unprecedented navigational tools (Google Maps, Yelp, Uber), spatialized social networks (Foursquare), and perhaps most importantly, the camera.
#111: Indoor Kids
#111: Indoor Kids
#111: Indoor Kids
Happy New Year! This week is an opportunity to ponder decade-long trend arcs and make grandiose pronouncements of what the last ten years were “about,” and I’ll gladly indulge. During the holidays, I usually watch more movies and TV shows than I do the entire rest of the year (time I’d otherwise spend reading tweets), so I’m particularly attuned to the meteoric rise of Netflix this decade, which I’ll come back to soon. At a glance, however, this was the mobile decade: In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than in the prior three years of the device’s existence combined, and acquiring one marked the dawn of the decade for many of us. Back then, the iPhone seemed like a mechanism for getting us out of the house and living more of our lives in public. Not only did smartphones let us accomplish mundane tasks like replying to emails without running home to our desktops, they transformed our relationship to the urban environment with unprecedented navigational tools (Google Maps, Yelp, Uber), spatialized social networks (Foursquare), and perhaps most importantly, the camera.