You turn down the satellite radio station blaring in your hybrid Prius, in time to hear the voice-navigation system command a right turn into the parking lot of the Apple Store, which you had Google- mapped in hope of buying an iPod. Suddenly your BlackBerry buzzes that your daughter finally friended you on Facebook. She reminds you to TiVo “American Idol” and “Survivor” for the New Year. She also relays the message that the Botox doc you found on Craigslist can fit you in on Friday, so you’ll be looking good for the Monday job interview arranged through . Whew. A day — or rather a minute — filled with buzzwords that didn’t exist in America 10 years ago.
While 9/11 and other major events of the decade shaped the world stage, technology we now take for granted incrementally transformed the lives of many Coloradans. Names and functions including Wikipedia, pirated music and ubiquitous laptops, DVDs and camera phones quickly embedded themselves in a fast-paced decade of cultural change.
“It’s interesting that we can’t imagine life without them now,” says David Broadway, a prominent plastic surgeon in Lone Tree. “They became part of our world so quickly, we can’t remember what we did before.”
No doubt many of his patients concur — especially those who, since 2002, have battled the subtle creases of age with botulinum toxin type A.
Broadway remembers well when the Food and Drug Administration approved Botox to smooth over frown lines — and how clients, nearly all women, almost immediately lined up for treatment.
More recently, ultrasound and lasers have redefined cosmetic body sculpting with the advent of high-definition liposuction, inflating expectations of patients seeking a vital, hard-edged physique.
High-tech explosion
The rapid absorption of new technology may well prove one of the major themes of the decade when social historians look back in wonder.
The number of people consistently online in North America sped from 108 million in 2000 to 253 million this year. The decade saw the promise of instant, all-encompassing information finally fulfilled: Google started linking ads to searches and powered its way into all corners of life; “Wikipedia” became a verb; and sites like Craigslist, Monster, Facebook and LinkedIn blurred socializing with utility.
For many white-collar employees, and an entire generation of teens, constant “connection” became the status quo. When was the last time you were at a meeting when someone wasn’t thumbing a BlackBerry or iPhone to “talk” to others, asked University of Denver gaming development professor Scott Leutenegger. Teenagers aren’t interested in separate, old-style cameras, he added as a side note. They simply snap smartphone pictures of everything they see, and post the images instantly to their friends or Web pages.
With that great power, the great burden of connectivity is inseparable, argues Denver job-site maven Andrew Hudson.
“Technology is always marketed as a way to make our lives easier, but the expectation becomes that people can do more because they can do it faster,” said Hudson, a publicist and proprietor of andrewhudsons- . “That doesn’t make our lives less complicated.”
Yes, an employee can check her work e-mail while sitting in a coffee shop at 2 p.m., but she’s also now expected to respond to a boss’s text at 10 p.m.
Hudson held a “Twitter garage sale,” posting links to pictures of what he wanted to sell. No annoying crowds came to his lawn to paw through goods, and he sold everything but two items for nearly $1,000 total.
On the other hand, Hudson said, “What are now the ‘Top 10 Excuses for Not Being Connected’? My cellphone fell in the toilet?”
Away from the job, though, the decade’s technological advances have created connections that reinforce relationships with far-flung relatives, keep families up to date and provide previously unimagined peace of mind for parents.
Sure, Michael Bardi uses a Global Positioning System — the U.S. government opened precise satellite signals for this use in 2000 — to maximize productivity on his routes as a process server in Colorado Springs.
But he can also pick up his phone and run an application that shows him the exact coordinates of his children, whom he has equipped with cellphones at ever younger ages. At 42, Bardi has embraced every new thing he figures will keep him closer to family and friends — text-messaging, Facebook, e-mail, camera-phones.
“I’m only a click away from anybody,” he says. “We looked into technology, how it would help and benefit us as opposed to how it would hinder us. We figured out how to make it work for us.”
That includes family-friendly entertainment like geocaching, a sort of GPS-powered treasure hunt that runs against the idea of computer games as solitary pursuits in a dark room.
The world’s a click away
Technology opened yet another populist diversion early in 2003, when the aptly named Chris Moneymaker became the first online player to win the main event at the World Series of Poker.
The fact that a regular guy could enter a $39 satellite tournament at and parlay that into a $2.5 million jackpot captured the imagination of people like Bardi, a self-described poker enthusiast.
“Once he won,” Bardi says, “that opened up the doors for anyone else.”
And with online play, those doors swung open 2 4/7.
But the games people play shot off in many directions during the decade, from the introduction of Xbox in 2001 to the 2005 launch of Wii, and crossed generational lines. Gaming communities did battle everywhere from online to retirement homes, where Wii offered low-impact exercise that put shuffleboard to shame.
Soon after that explosion of possibility came reflective citizens worried their virtual connections might overwhelm reality. Denver entrepreneur Ted Pinkowitz has a job exploiting technology to create closer community ties, but he also urges his family to avoid electronic overload.
Pinkowitz co-founded Neighborhood Link, a free service creating Web pages for neighborhood associations and community organizations.
Thirty-five to 40 neighborhoods a week now contact the company from around the nation, and city residents have come to expect accurate, useful civic links online, he said. It’s a gratifying, community-building fulfillment of lofty predictions made only 10 to 15 years ago.
Yet Pinkowitz strives to wall off his young children from computers and other technology. He’s keeping his cellphone decidedly stupid for now.
“I really believe that there’s information overload, and that impinges on wisdom and perspective,” Pinkowitz said. “Everyone will have to make these decisions, because I don’t know that there are gray areas anymore. You’re either accessible all the time, or inaccessible.”
Our diversions have become more accessible than ever — a tidal shift that began with the rise of the Napster free file-sharing model at the turn of the decade, and morphed into the combination of free and paid-for online music available today.
The introduction of the iPod in 2001 and the array of mp3 players in its wake set the stage for a new way of consuming music — and later, video — without interference from any media gatekeeper, observes Heather Browne, whose Colorado Springs- based has attracted music fans over the last four years.
“Whether you’re reading on a music blog why this ‘common person’ loves that song or watching uploaded video from a concert on YouTube, it’s this primacy of experience that people seem to want,” Browne says. “There seems to be this quest for authenticity.”
Technology has driven us away from the album concept to become a “song-based culture,” she notes, as we download only what we want, virtually as soon as we realize we want it. But it also has reinvigorated our ability to consume music.
“It’s not that musicians are doing anything different, but people are consuming it in bits and pieces rather than as a whole,” she says. “I feel like there’s this immense amount of music to listen to, and people coincidentally — paradoxically — have less patience to sit with music. We skip around more.”
On the horizon
The decade also launched a host of innovations that may not be fulfilled until late in the coming decade, but whose possibilities seem unlimited.
With the 2003 completion of the Human Genome Project, which aimed to identify every gene in human DNA, scientists began the daunting task of trying to sort the deluge of information.
Building computer programs to process all this knowledge is part of what Lawrence Hunter does as director of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine.
From his vantage point, it’s hard to overstate what the decade has meant to an area of science that holds such abundant promise.
“It’s an inflection point, the moment we knew that the big change was really going to happen — a genome-scale understanding of life,” Hunter says. “That’s going to affect medicine, the way we try to deal with environmental problems — it’s going to affect everything about life.”
Already, HGP data have contributed to a new understanding of how genetic variability impacts drug dosing. The FDA already tells doctors to consider genetic factors when calculating dosage for blood thinners. Now it’s just a matter of time before the ramifications of the project extend even further into biomedicine and countless other areas.
“We’ve turned the corner,” Hunter says. “We’re not there yet. But we can see it.”
Michael Booth: 303-954-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com
