When we sum up this decade, which ends at midnight, will we end up with a Big Zero?

I don’t think so, even though I agree with Paul Krugman in most things.   I have a hard time thinking about the development of Social Media, that happened almost entirely in this decade, as being a zero.

At the end of 1999, as I recall, we were realizing there was a lot of unused Fiber Optic cable that was being built all of the United States, and Internationally, as well … and companies were going broke, or soon to be going broke, selling us a lot of extra bandwidth and capacity for it that we didn’t need (then).

What about now?  Does anything think we have enough network bandwidth capacity?  Most of America is now on Broadband, anyway, and the issue of having too much unused bandwidth has gone away, it’s not even relevant anymore.

As we round out towards 2012, there seems to be a growing awareness that our way of life is changing and we can’t go back and it’s difficult to compare, even, what we have now, with this point in time, 100 years ago (say, 1900-1910 -1900, 1901, 1902-1904, 1905-1907, 1908-1909 or 1800-1810) – there’s nothing much that happened in the past that can parallel this time.  We can say that in 1800-1810 – Europe as occupied with the Napoleonic wars which might echo into our times, and in the 1900′s, a lot of building and public works projects (like the New York Subway) was being built and expanded – but nothing really compares to the time we’re living in now.

I would not call it a Zero, though – it might be more like the hangover you get after 1999, when it seemed like the world was going into the 21st Century and we were looking forward to what we would find … and what we ended up with, in 2008-2009, is a close call with world economic collapse – but that’s not a zero.

If the comparison of periods of time fits at all, it’s that we’re 10 years into a new century and a new millennium -perhaps, a lot of new beginnings that don’t add up to much, now, but will, later.