How Has The Internet Changed American Society And The American Economy

Every bit the decade comes to a shut, what's changed? PBS NewsHour takes a wait at the major shifts in social norms, global economies and how engineering science affects our daily lives.

From smartphones to LBGTQ rights, here are some of the most memorable ways in which the world has changed over the past 10 years.

We became glued to our smartphones

When Apple tree CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he promised the "revolutionary" device would "reinvent the telephone."

By most measures, he was correct. Effectually 81 percent of Americans endemic smartphones as of this by February, compared with 35 percent in 2011. Nosotros use them to find directions, read the news, take pictures and even doing our banking. Oh, and we sometimes apply them to talk to each other.

Equally smartphones became ubiquitous, so did users' attachment to them. Average smartphone owners spend several hours on their phones each day.

An entire "gig economy" has been built around services that are at present available at smartphone users' fingertips–from transportation to grocery commitment.

But there'south a downside to this convenience: studies suggest that spending too much time on smartphones can cause depression and anxiety, and psychiatrists worry that young people'southward dependence on their phones borders on addiction.

Data visualization by Megan McGrew

Workers employed in the gig economic system are likewise feeling the side effects of users' expectations for on-need services at depression costs. Lyft and Uber drivers went on strike before this year to protest low wages and unfair working atmospheric condition, and delivery drivers for mobile services such as DoorDash and Postmates have said even small changes to the companies' algorithms can have a significant impact on their pay.

Increased computing power has led many families to cancel their traditional cablevision television subscriptions in favor of streaming services such every bit Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. By 2021, the number of American households without traditional cable subscriptions is expected to reach 48.three pct, more than double the share in 2013.

The appearance of streaming put video rental stores such as Blockbuster out of business organisation and propelled media companies such as Disney, AT&T and NBC to cash in on the tendency.

We witnessed the organizing power – and danger – of social media

Over the past 10 years, the popularity of existing social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp grew exponentially, and new social media sites, including Instagram, Telegram and TikTok were launched.

Some of those social networking sites have been used to organize anti-authorities movements around the world. They played an instrumental role during the 2011 Arab Bound, when protesters against authoritarian governments took to Twitter and Facebook to organize calls for new leadership. More recently, they have been used in "leaderless" protests in Hong Kong, Lebanese republic and Republic of chile.

Demonstrators celebrate atop an army tank in Tahrir foursquare during protests in Cairo January 29, 2011. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak refused on Saturday to bow to demands that he resign after ordering troops and tanks into cities in an endeavour to quell an explosion of street protests against his thirty-twelvemonth rule. Photo past Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

Although social media has bolstered pro-democracy efforts around the world, it has too proven a threat to democracy. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia used Facebook and other social media outlets to sow disinformation and discord amidst voters to heave the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Nosotros saw the effects of climate change become very real

Over the past decade, the threat of climate change became more than tangible for communities effectually the earth.

In California, "mega wildfires" wiped out entire towns, burning across larger areas than in previous years. Europe suffered through a tape-breaking heat wave, and a "blob" of warm sea h2o disrupted marine ecosystems off the coast of Alaska.

Multiple studies have shown that climate change makes many natural disasters worse and recently scientists have fifty-fifty been able to link individual storms to climate change.

Polls bear witness most Americans believe that climate change is happening. At the aforementioned time, debate about how to address or mitigate its effects is still a partisan upshot, pitting the interests of environmental groups against workers in industries such every bit oil and coal.

Trump has long voiced skepticism about climate change and pedaled misleading claims about the link between the weather condition forecast and broader issues surrounding global warming. After Trump took part, the U.South. appear it would withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, an international pledge by more than 200 nations to cutting greenhouse gas emissions in hopes of slowing the planet'south warming. That despite the fact that more than conservative Republicans—32 percent—are worried near global warming now than in the last decade

Climate skepticism isn't unique to the U.South. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently expressed uncertainty that mortiferous bushfires affecting his land had any link to global warming, and Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro has dismissed international concerns well-nigh deforestation and fires in the Amazon, which could worsen climatic change.

Despite international efforts, a recent Un study plant that countries haven't acted quickly enough or taken pregnant plenty steps to combat climate change. Carbon emissions now need to be reduced by 7.6 percent each twelvemonth to avoid the most devastating effects.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg participates in a youth climate change protestation near the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, New York, U.S.,September 6, 2019. Photo by Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

The crisis has already caused people to abscond their homes and sparked a youth movement led by the likes of Greta Thunberg, who has traveled the world to urge older lawmakers to take more serious action with future generations in mind.

"Politicians brand decisions that are expedient for getting through the next few years," said Philip Duffy, president and executive manager of the Woods Hole Research Center, a Massachusetts-based think tank that focuses on climate alter.

Duffy said young people are right to be angry.

"If you lot're a business tycoon, you lot think of it in terms of loss," Duffy said. To immature climate change protesters, "taking policy steps to cope with climate change doesn't stand for whatever kind of loss."

We bounced back from the recession, but inequality grew

The U.S. economy largely recovered from the 2008 recession over the by decade, with GDP growing steadily and unemployment reaching a fifty-year low. Notwithstanding, a majority of economists recently said in a survey that they expect a recession to occur in 2021, and many Americans remain dissatisfied with the country of the economic system.

Income inequality has worsened, sending voters to populist politicians, both left and right. Far-left politicians such equally 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., take crafted their campaigns effectually targeting the so-called "billionaire grade."

Gentrification and a shortage of affordable housing has fueled displacement in cities from Washington, D.C., to Portland, and homelessness rose for iii years in a row, with states such as California and Idaho struggling to accommodate those affected by the crisis.

We saw the human toll and politicization of the global migration crisis

Two of the most striking photos of the decade showed the human toll of the global migration crunch.

One, taken in 2015, showed a three-yr-old Syrian boy named Aylan Kurdi, whose body was found washed up on a beach in Turkey. He had drowned after being separated from the rest of his family, which fled the Syrian Civil War and were trying to reach Greece. A similar photograph went viral this by summer, showing a father who had drowned alongside his 23-month-old daughter while fleeing El Salvador for the U.Southward.

The victims in these photos were a few of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled their homes in recent years due to violence and political instability. In Europe, the migration crisis driven by the Syrian Civil War came to a head in 2015, when thousands of migrants were held in camps from Lesbos, Hellenic republic to Calais, France. More iii,000 died trying to cross the Mediterranean that twelvemonth.

A Syrian refugee kid looks on, moments afterward arriving on a raft with other Syrian refugees on a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos, January 4, 2016. Photo by Giorgos Moutafis/Reuters

European countries were divided on how to address the upshot. While German language Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to welcome more than than ane one thousand thousand refugees to the country, many asylum-seekers were turned away from other countries such every bit Hungary, where Prime Government minister Victor Orbàn has denounced refugees as "Muslim invaders."

WATCH: What happened after ii Syrian families who fabricated it to Deutschland

In the U.South., anti-immigrant rhetoric fueled Trump's ascent to the presidency in 2016, equally he promised to "build a wall" to go along out migrants fleeing from Central and South America. More than than three years after Trump took office, some parts of the border fencing have been replaced just no new border wall has been built.

There has been substantial backlash, however, over some of Trump'southward other immigration policies that were implemented, including a ban on travel from certain majority Muslim countries and the administration's "zippo-tolerance" policy that systematically separated children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

"We are living in an era of skepticism nearly migration," said Demetrios Papademetriou, sometime erstwhile president of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.

Politicians such as Trump and India's Prime number Minister Narendra Modi, who has been criticized for a citizenship law that is seen equally anti-Muslim, "know how to articulate fears and take advantage of them to gain political power," Papdemetriou said.

We had hard conversations about sex and power

The #MeToo movement showtime began in 2006, merely it gained national and international attention after news manufactures in 2017 shed light on Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein's serial harassment of women in the entertainment industry.

Women around the earth came forward with stories of being mistreated in the workplace. Those accusations led to the resignations of hundreds of powerful men.

Before that year, thousands of women descended on Washington for the Women's March post-obit the election of Trump, who was accused of sexual harassment past more than a dozen women earlier taking part.

While it's hard to quantify the impact of the movement, researchers Ro'ee Levy and Martin Mattsson did find that reporting of sex crimes to the police in the U.S. increased past seven percent in the first three months afterward it started. The results held true 15 months later based on information from seven major U.S. cities.

"Nosotros sensed that the motion broadly changed public discourse," Levy and Mattson wrote in an email to the PBS NewsHour. They added that their study suggested the #MeToo movement "had a persistent effect on reporting sexual crimes."

For all the successes of the movement, there accept been setbacks, too. In an interview with the PBS NewsHour, one of Neb Cosby's accusers, Lili Bernard, said the fact that the histrion faced jail time for abusing women showed at that place had been "this tremendous shift in rape culture towards finally believing women." But his conviction was rare.

Allegations of sexual harassment and corruption at the easily of powerful men have only resulted in a handful of convictions since the movement began. Weinstein recently reached a $44 meg tentative settlement agreement to resolve the ceremonious lawsuits against him. He still faces criminal charges.

Many women saw the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court equally a loss for the movement. He was accused of sexually abusing his loftier school classmate, Christine Blasey Ford. Although she testified about the incident, he did not face any ramifications. Republicans said the accusations were "unsubstantiated."

We watched countries grapple with LGBTQ rights and representation

The decade started with the repeal of Don't Inquire, Don't Tell, a Clinton-era policy that had banned openly LGBTQ members from serving in the military. While information technology was a landmark legislative achievement for the LGBTQ customs, gay couples were still non allowed to marry under federal law in 2010.

The U.S. legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 with the landmark Supreme Court determination Obergefell five. Hodges, which declared they had the right of "equal nobility in the eyes of the law." A number of other countries legalized same-sex marriage over the past decade, including Argentine republic, French republic, and most recently, Taiwan and Northern Ireland.

Data visualization by Megan McGrew

The transgender rights movement also gained steam, in part through fights over controversial "bathroom bills" that would have required people to use bathrooms based on the sexual practice listed on their nascency document. In 2017, Danica Roem became the kickoff openly transgender state legislator when she won a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates.

Along with these legislative gains, television shows such equally "Pose" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" along with acclaimed films such as "Blue Is The Warmest Color," "Carol," "Moonlight," and "Telephone call Me By Your Name," carved out a bigger space for LGBTQ representation in pop culture. In 2014, "Orange Is the New Black" star LaVerne Cox made history when she became the showtime openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy in an interim category.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/from-tech-to-society-how-weve-changed-in-a-decade

Posted by: stonewhicanot.blogspot.com

Share this post