Goodbye No-Name-Decade

By Tim Leberecht - December 31, 2009

Now that its end is near (at least in the Western hemisphere), all of a sudden everyone seems to have plenty of time to reflect on a decade that up to this point has constantly been moving too fast to be reflected upon. It was an odd one, too, and in her excellent New Yorker piece Rebecca Mead muses: “In retrospect, it might be recognized as a troubling harbinger that, ten years ago, no consensus could be reached in this country on what to call the decade upon which we were about to embark. The ohs? The double-ohs? The zeros? The zips? The nadas? The naughties?”

CNN calls it “a decade of greed,” the Washington Post the decade of “American awakening.” In any case, Mead points out that now on December 31, 2009, “we still don’t have a good collective name for the decade (…), at least, not one beyond 'the first decade of the twenty-first century,’ which is gratifyingly lacking in cuteness but may be too wordy for practicality, particularly given contemporary constraints. (Call it that on Twitter, and you’ve used up a third of your character allotment.)"

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Mead: “With its intractable conflicts and its irresolvable crises, its astonishing accomplishments and its devastating failures, the decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to – or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all. “

Below, find some more reviews of this “no-name decade” that are worth reading and thinking about…and then let’s move on to 2010, fast.

Happy New Year, happy new decade!

New York Times Times infographic: Picturing the Decade

New York Times: The Decade’s Best Design (slideshow)

Core77: The Decade in Design

Good: The Decade in Design

San Jose Mercury News: It's the end of the decade, and Silicon Valley is doing fine

CNN Money: Farewell to an ugly decade

ReadWrite Web: A Decade of Innovation: How We See the Internet 10 Years After the Boom