The star of the show was hardware and firmware advancements. Software and content, while increasing in quantity, took a dump in quality. I can’t think of much culturally that would actually define this decade. Much of it was trying to rehash everything previous to it because…I dunno…people gave up…people gave up. But fuck it, the past is salvageable. Thanks internet!

Mashups
At the turn of the century, commercial music creatively lit itself on fire and pranced around until it collapsed on the ground and rolled around a lot. Sure good music has come out this decade and sure most of it is difficult to discover, but what else happened? What band took the world by storm? The answer is none. As much fun as it is watching Radiohead, Tool, Killers, and Arctic Monkeys fans try to stab each other to death, the winner of the decade was the culture movement to shatter the copyright hold on music culture. Bloc Party mixed with Nine Inch Nails, Kanye West thrown against Oasis, Eminem vs Miles Davis, Metallica vs Dolly Parton. Stealing music in waves meant little up against smashing it all together into seventy minute balls worth hundreds of infringement lawsuits. Everything from creation, possession, to listening to most of the products of this subgenre is all kinds of illegal, but the product done well is so worth it. Thank you to TimG, Girl Talk, PartyBen, McSleazy, 2 Many DJs, DJ Food, Soulwax, and countless others for making the spectrum of music suck far, far less than it otherwise would.
(honorable mention: P2P services)

MP3 players.
Remember when music skipped? That sucked. Remember when portable music was limited to fifteen disc tracks or a hundred on a MP3 cd? That sucked. Remember carrying some large disc piece of shit that couldn’t fit in a pocket to save your life? That sucked. If you still carried around a cassette player? Sweet jesus god help your soul. MP3 players came along and made the world a better place. Now you can play music from your pocket, your phone, your watch, your shoe, your hat, anywhere you damn well please. If it exists, there’s probably a version with a MP3 player stuck in it.
(honorable mention: Podcasting)

Custom Soundtracks
Sorry friends, most videogame music sucks. Gaming should be the combined art of visuals, interactivity, and sound. In practice, most works just meh their way through two thirds of those qualities. Thankfully, being able to replace most Xbox 360 soundtracks with your own saves you from 1/3rd of the mediocre qualities in a videogame. Bless their hearts for forcing that. Now if Sony could force this on all developers, we’d be in good business.
(honorable mention: Custom Ringtones/Ringback)

HD Projectors
You’re stuck in a classroom watching a powerpoint of some halfhearted lecture, you look in the back of the machine and see all the A/V inputs that you use for your awesome things, then you think to yourself, “holy shit wouldn’t it be sweet to have this in my house?!” Well friend, for $500 you can. The results are the best any priest could hope for. You can have the biggest personal TV screen in your city if you play your alignment right. The other shocker is I have nothing but contempt for HDTVs when I’m not watching the game. The input lag on almost all of them makes twitch video gaming almost impossible. HD Projectors don’t have these problems. Fuck you HDTV, bless you HD projector.
(honorable mention: free streamed porn)

Touch Smartphones/Personal Digital Assistants
Nothing made me look like I knew what I was doing more than having a personal organizer in my pocket. I had a Palm PDA for the longest time with a 4GB MP3 player in it. This was years before the iTouch. Nowadays, phones with touch capability often have competent organizers built into it. In addition, hundreds of random applications can be hosted by your phone to do any electronic task you can think of. Smartphones are a work of wonder, even if the cell phone service powering them is overpriced junk.
(honorable mention: Nintendo DS)
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