21st century: Encyclopedia II - 21st century - Overview

21st century - Overview

The 21st century has had an influence on culture since well before it began. Speculation about future, social, cultural, and technological trends frequently centered on the year 2000, starting with late-19th century essays and novels (often of a utopian nature) such as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, though Bellamy explicitly called the year 2000 "the Twentieth Century." It's been said that the event horizon of Western culture was steadily shrinking in this period, since as late as the 1990s people were still often focusing on the year 2000 in their discussions of the future.

As of 2006, the 21st Century retrospectively refers to the years 2000-2006 and informally sometimes to events of the 1990s.

Religious beliefs in a "millennial apocalypse" were supplemented by genuine concerns about the Y2k computer "bug" and about possible terrorist attacks centered on the year-2000 celebrations, but the actual turn of the millennium (both the popularly-celebrated one in 2000 and the "purist" one in 2001) went by in a fairly anticlimactic manner. Interestingly, many of the trends of the early 21st Century began in the 1990s (and even earlier decades). In fact, one could argue that the 1990s decade is in the same social era as the 2000s and a separate one from the 1980s and earlier decades.

However, the years since have continued in the tumultuous manner people of the 20th century were accustomed to expect, with wars, terrorism, and other conflicts, as well as continued advances in science and technology including the continuing expansion of the use of computers and the Internet (despite the "tech bubble burst" where the overexuberance of early Internet companies was deflated).

So far in the 21st century, the main historical trends have been the violent conflict between Western Civilization and Islamist Terrorism, the search for solutions to global warming, the continued growth of the European Community and the rapid emergence of China and India as global industrial powers.

More Y2k-style computer date failures are due before the end of the 21st century; the Unix datestamps, consisting of a count of the number of seconds since 1970, may overflow in 2038, while the family of operating systems descended from MS-DOS (including the various versions of Microsoft Windows) can't handle dates beyond 2099.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Overview", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki