Technology trends that reshaped our lives in the 2010s: 10 years in 10,000 words

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TechCzech

3 min readJan 9, 2020

As the date on the calendar undergoes a significant visual change, many people are reviewing the big tech events and trends of the decade. These are interesting, but they tend to think of these trends from the perspective of developments in technology.

In this list, I’d like to focus on changes from the perspective of notable and noticeable changes in the shapes of people’s lives. What I mean by these are not necessarily fundamental transformations but rather different ways of doing things that change the way we approach similar tasks. But these small changes transform our frame of reference and what we expect from the world. They change the shapes of the scripts and schemas we use to make sense of the world.

I’m not going to be strictly focusing on things introduced or invented during the last decade. Rather, I want to look at technology trends that came to maturity or achieved widespread use during this decade. The sorts of things that may have existed in the years before but only came into their own at some point during the 2010s.

This started as a few quick bullet points on New Year’s Eve but soon grew to over 10,000 words — a kilo of words per year. But the list is not organised by year. Rather it is split into 5 sections:

Within each section, I list between half a dozen and a dozen trends — sometimes connected with each other, sometimes independent, mostly representing whole fields or industries but sometimes focusing on individual products or services.

For convenience, I split each section into separate post, but here’s a list of all the items in each section: