The Broadcast Century and Beyond, 4th Edition

The New Century: The 2000s

Webs and Digits

The first decade of the new millennium has started out to be a tumultuous one. One prediction of chaos, however, did not occur. A widespread belief in the late 1990s was that a Y2K bug would disrupt and possibly destroy computer communications and other electronic media throughout the world. Such an apocalypse did not occur on January 1, 2000 (or on January 1, 2001, the technical but less dramatic start of the new century). The seminal event of the new century was the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City and the crashing of other hijacked planes into the Pentagon and into a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001. Another key event occurred the year before, in 2000, when ...