In Summary
- Social media (along with enabling technology like the rise of cheap camera-enabled smartphones) has significantly and permanently changed how we live our lives.
- In the decade just past, an anxious parent would look up symptoms on a search engine before entrusting their sick child to the doctor, however many certificates lined the wall.
This past decade has been an interesting and seminal one.
To begin with, it is the final 10-year period in our lifetimes which did not have a proper name.
This past decade was also one without a proper name. Of course, it would be easy to call it the “teens” but, beside the unfortunate evocation of undecided adolescence, there was also the question of the orphan years between 2010 and 2012.
But whether these were the “tensies”, or the 2010s (making everything look like it occurred in a single year), it was a period that was unusually intense, and some of the trends that began or intensified in this era will resound for years to come.
MILLENNIUM PARTIES
Some prefer to analyse decades through the events that took place. Some will study the decade through the lives and biographies of significant figures.
Both these approaches are useful, each in its own way. However, they both have restrictions.
So, for this series of essays, looking back at the past decade and looking forward to the next one, it may be useful to look at the trends that have defined this past decade and the ones that are likely to impact the new one.
Before we begin, though, let us get one pedantic quibble out of the way.
Of course, technically, the decade began on January 1, 2011 and will end on December 31, 2020. But let’s face it, the best millennium parties were on December 31, 1999 into January 1, 2000.
There are some who delayed their parties for a year and declared the millennium party at the end of 2000, but few attended those parties, and the fireworks were rather desultory.
So what were some of the defining trends of the 2010s?
ARAB SPRING
The past decade began with what reformers had been predicting would happen for years.
The sclerosis of regimes the world over, especially in the Middle East, was going to lead to their overthrow by exhausted citizens.
The revolutions, which began in Tunisia with a street vendor tired of petty humiliations, quickly spread.
Tottering dictatorships in places like Egypt fell rapidly, and all this was fuelled by the information revolution spreading all around the world.
Outrage fed the demonstrations at the beginning and at the end of the decade, starting in the Middle East and ending in places as diverse as Hong Kong, Lebanon and Venezuela.
The earlier revolutions were quashed or turned into counter revolutions, using the very same tools that made them possible.
Crowds could be quickly called to action without the need for clandestine meetings. However, these organisers could easily be penetrated and tracked.
BREXIT, TRUMP ERAS
There may have been no need to produce samizdat using easily discoverable photocopiers and printers, but the ease with which material could be produced to support a revolution meant that audio, video and text could be injected into the same online tools for the opposite effect.
Outrage manifested itself for good and ill in the past decade. Powerful men who were fond of sexually molesting their underlings were unmasked and dethroned, and the #MeToo movement gave a powerful voice to the previously mute.
In India, people were lynched when rumours spread that they were slaughtering cows, and these were rumours birthed and spread online.
The speed and ease with which these stories spread was a testament to the revolution wrought by technology, but it made them difficult to debunk, let alone deal with their terrible aftermath.
Electoral politics was also a fount of expressed outrage. The 2013 Kenyan elections can be argued, in part, to have been an expression of outrage towards the International Criminal Court.
The 2016 Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump to the White House were the outraged howl of declining demographics; a scream at the end of privilege and the fear of the rise of the dark hordes.
Brexiteers and Trumpists cleverly harnessed this outrage for electoral benefit, and the outcome will take decades to reveal itself.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Of all the things the 2010s wrought, it is the celebration of the individual that has been most noticeable.
The simplest explanation, obviously, is the effect of social media. Facebook, Twitter and the other tools arose in the decade before, but it is in this past decade that they reached critical mass.
Billions of people joined social media, with many millions of those in Kenya.
Photographs were shared, the deepest thoughts laid bare to the world, and direct connections made with people who would heretofore only be glimpsed at a remove.
The ability of public figures to be as directly crude as they care to be has been shown earlier.
They are hardly, though, the vanguard of the individualisation of the world and the primacy of the use of social media.
Tots in bassinets are having digital devices thrust into their hands when they are merely minutes old, with births broadcast live to an amazed (or disinterested) world.
CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS
From then on, it is all downhill. Every movement (including bowel ones) is recorded, annotated and shared.
Every report form, every lost tooth, every heartbreak, every moment of teenage angst is published, consumed and dissected.
Audiences range from the few dozen to the millions, and so all-consuming has it become that it has spawned an industry all its own — the social media influencer.
Life, it is said, is no longer lived. It is curated. While social media may be harmless fun to many, the effects are deep, dangerous and long lasting.
Social media (along with enabling technology like the rise of cheap camera-enabled smartphones) has significantly and permanently changed how we live our lives.
On the positive side, it has allowed the documenting and sharing of important developments.
A bus speeding on the highway will be recorded on a dashboard camera and the details of its murderous drive broadcast long before it reaches its destination, or is involved in an accident.
A leering boss harassing an underling is now increasingly wary of recordings of audio and video.
THE DARK SIDE
However, there is much to be feared. Unthinking antics, which in previous generations would be the subject of half-remembered thoughts and pounding headaches in the morning, are now permanently recorded, endangering careers and reputations.
A school bully in the past would be satisfied with ordering a poor first former to collect darkness in a bucket, or to serenade a broomstick.
Now, however, the bullying must be of the cruellest, most performative kind — the type that will earn one accolades from fellow sociopaths online.
Extortion is the order of the day, and humiliation is the ultimate aim for many in their social media encounters.
Worst is two effects. First, the children being paraded on social media by narcissistic parents have no say in the matter, with the most intimate stages of their development being fodder for likes and currency for influence.
The parents are blissfully unaware, or remarkably uncaring, of the material they put out for paedophiles, and the potential for maladjusted development.
Second is the death of truth. A social media post need not be true to be viral.
ALL ARE CONNOISSEURS
As a matter of fact, the more salacious the incident, the more it trends.
People’s lives have been shredded at the altar of a social media lie, and we are only at the infancy of a disturbing trend.
When everyone has a voice, everyone becomes an expert. And when everyone becomes an expert, expertise itself is debased.
The decline of the trend that had existed in the past, where institutions such as the church, government and professionals were trusted on the basis that they knew what they were doing, and that what they were doing was largely to the benefit of their societies, only accelerated in the past decade.
Institutions and individuals whose authority was rarely questioned have now seen their place on the totem pole of respect plummet.
It is said that in Kenya, one can move from being an aviation expert to a pathologist of some repute in the time it takes to marshal an argument on social media. It goes somewhat beyond that though.
In times past, the doctor, the priest and the headmaster were the unquestioned masters of their domain, and it would take a brave iconoclast to argue with their opinions and declared expertise.
In the decade just past, however, an anxious parent would look up symptoms on a search engine before entrusting their sick child to the doctor, however many certificates lined the wall.
A CAUTIOUS GENERATION
Students dispute marks given by their lecturers, frantically pointing at an updated corpus of knowledge gleaned from a journal in the subject area.
A priest will hesitate while leading his flock, lest the reports of philandering pastors gets thrown back at him.
In some respects, some of this diminution of dominion is necessary. In recent days, there have been reports of misdiagnosis, some of it with fatal outcomes.
Thus, while references to ‘Dr Google’ will make real doctors want to pull their hair out, an informed patient makes for a careful medic.
Unquestioning deference to religious leaders leads to charlatanism or worse.
Newer ways of doing old jobs has also led to the changing of the relationship between erstwhile experts and their audiences.
No longer are there editors sitting unchallenged in an ivory tower, determining the news agenda and how a polity should think.
Now that anyone with a mobile phone and a social media following can break a news story, and every public figure of note reaches out directly to their audiences, news organisations are still scrambling to figure out what their place is in this changed environment.
LOSS OF AUTHORITY
Even more worryingly for each of these institutions and professions, the very source of doubt has become a self-affirming loop.
Many times a doctor has been seen furtively looking at the internet when a particular set of symptoms have stumped her.
A news report might simply be a retelling of the goings-on on social media. Governments and their agencies, as well, have suffered the consequences of the loss of authority.
In the run-up to the British referendum in 2016 (itself an admission that the delegated authority given to elected leaders needed to be delegated back to the citizens for their direct opinion), one of the leading lights of the ‘leave’ campaign declared that the people had ‘had enough of experts’.
Michael Gove, a graduate of Oxford and a former journalist for the most elitist of newspapers, The Times of London, was asking the electorate to turn their backs precisely on people like him.
Whether this was a cynical ploy for votes or a sign of the times is immaterial.
That notion, as well as the election of the most manifestly unqualified candidate in the modern history of the American presidency (beating the candidate with the most impressive CV ever) could have been an aberration, or a sign of the times.
Time was when you said that you bought your clothes abroad, you were either a wasteful dilettante, or else you were a typical African kleptocrat trying to keep up with the Mobutus.
BROKEN BOUNDARIES
Commerce was kept within national borders, and it was even unusual for you, as a shopper, to seek a regular supply of commodities from a different town, let alone a different country.
This past decade, though, things changed in a way that has deep implications for corporate entities, consumers, and tax and standards authorities.
The ubiquity of the internet, a revolution in payment options, as well as cheap shipping, have seen any commodity, including the most mundane and even most perishable, be available from any part of the world to any other part of the world.
Take the clothes shopper we spoke about earlier. Do you have an infant and cannot get the right clothes for her?
You can order from a website, pay and have the clothes at your door in a couple of weeks.
Are you salivating over the latest smartphone or laptop computer? You need not wait until your local distributor stocks it, months from now.
Companies manufacturing consumer goods can now no longer get away with creating different quality of products for different markets.
Consumers want the motor vehicle they have lusted after from seeing a review online.
They have the means to purchase these goods, and ship them and use them in any part of the world.
DIGITAL MARKETING
New companies have developed to take advantage of this.
Bundlers in the West will take in items ordered from sites such as Amazon and ship them to whichever corner of the continent you ask them.
Many will even deal with customs agencies and pay any required tariffs and levies, and get the goods to your doorstep.
This obviously means that the old regime of approval of goods country by country is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
A standards agency can no longer be slow or stodgy in deciding whether goods are of a standard appropriate for its jurisdiction.
Country-specific agencies, if they are sufficiently innovative (or come from sufficiently powerful countries), end up setting standards for the whole world.
The corollary of this is that even the smallest of players can supply goods to the whole world.
In the last decade, producers ranging from the artisanal to full-blown companies have begun supplying goods to the world from bedrooms and factories all over Kenya and the continent.
They have mastered product quality, shipping and customer service, regardless of where the customers may be.