Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's really about mobile computing. While the iPhone debuted in 2007, adoption didn't really hit a critical mass until the early 2010s with the iPhone 4. That was also the time that Android was ramping up with Verizon's initial "DROID" campaign. People may have had an iPhone or a Blackberry in the late 2000's, but they were still doing most of their computing from a desktop. By the end of the 2010's, desktop computing (for non-professional purposes) had become the exception, not the norm.

And I think that goes hand in hand with how pervasive social media was during that decade. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - all installed on millions of personal devices and taking up a lot of attention and focus.

I agree, but I don't think it's mobile itself that's important: It's that mobile was a sign of this new technology (the internet) finally overcoming the hurdles of adoption from the average person (in this case primarily ease of use and portability). The 2010s were about the information revolution permeating all classes and castes in society: Prior to the 2010s there was a pretty sharp divide in people who used or didn't use the Internet (especially outside of work). (While most of us here would have had bubbles where everybody was online way earlier, I'm talking about everybody. The person born in 1940. The people living in the worst parts of the country who don't have internet service. Etc.) The 2010s are what tipped us into the default assumption being other citizens have access to and should use this new technology.

It's the difference between car as rich person curiosity and car as standard fare for most households.

The 2020s-2040s are going to be us figuring out what cultural guardrails and standards we want; I think this is what a lot of our current hot topics are actually discussing. Once enough of the population had cars, we started needing things like driver's licenses, traffic laws, car safety standards, etc. And we started doing things like altering our urban planning.

2010's were definitely all about putting a phone in every humans hands.

This.

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