The end is nigh. In just over three months, we will reach the end of the decade and no one is talking about it. Have we forgotten that the noughties (worst word in the world, I prefer to call them the two-thousand-and-zeros, or the twenty-hundreds, or the first decade of the 21st centu... oh whatever) are almost done? Does the passage of time not mean anything anymore? Are landmarks in the calendar irrelevant now that we have got past the biggest one of our lifetime, 2000? Is everything so hectic that reflection is relegated to Reeling In The Years? I've spent the last couple of weeks faffing around California, and when you are on holiday, you finally get a chance to think, and all I could think about was the end of the decade.

What do the 2000s mean? How will this decade be defined? Terrorism, war, incredible economic flux, social networking, reality TV. It's hard to reflect on a decade when you're still close to it. We have the '80s pretty much pegged, and the '90s are still kind of pushed onto the floor and under a rug like an embarrassed dinner-party host disguising a manky cracker, but thoughts on the '00s are pretty blank.

Having had the luxury of staring into space for long periods of time while away thinking about what the '00s mean, I've come to the conclusion that it was all about velocity. Everything began to move faster in the last 10 years. Information and data moved quicker. Every fact, theory, video, song, unanswered question and quote is just an internet search away. The gap between wanting to know and that information being accessible has been whittled down to seconds. It's remarkable really that information is 'just there' now, online; we never have to wait to find out or discover anything anymore. Ever spent days when you were a teenager searching for that elusive album in record shops, or try to remember the name of that guy in that film, or wonder what Proust actually wrote, or wonder what the weather was like in Paris? Those time-consuming experiences of sourcing information or products are gone. Everything we need to know, watch or listen to is 'just there'.

Relationships in the '00s have speeded up too. Most people make their first or second move by text. Online dating is no longer a taboo. There is no such thing as a long lost friend anymore: they are all on Facebook. There is no such thing as tediously finding out the basics about the person you're seeing from them or their friends anymore: you just Google them.

Because technology in the '00s cuts out a lot of time-consuming things for us (like thinking) everything moves quicker. Want to go shopping for a vintage dress? Boom, eBay, done. Want to have sex? Gaydar message sent, done. Want to arrange 10 friends in 10 parts of a city to meet in one place on a Saturday night? Group text message sent, done. The fact that we're doing so much more on a daily basis than we did in the '90s is actually making us more versatile, better at troubleshooting, better at multitasking (even men). According to Steven Johnson's 'Sleeper Curve' theory in Everything Bad Is Good For You, popular culture is not a race to the bottom but becoming increasingly complex and therefore making us smarter – and so has our ability at digesting information made us more quick-witted.

News cycles have also been speeded up in the '00s. The advent of blogs, paparazzi sites and Twitter makes news instant, not something reported after an event.
A celebrity falls over drunk in a club, someone videos it, it's online in an hour, has a million views in two. When a Luas and bus collided on O'Connell Street last week Dublin folk on Twitter (including myself) posted minute-by-minute eyewitness accounts. The Irish Times website ended up posting a photograph on its front page that was originally posted on Twitter. Welcome to fast news in a faster world.

At least next decade, we can hopefully look forward to the year finally being termed properly as "twenty ten" instead of "two thousand and ten". (Interesting aside: it's Stanley Kubrick's fault we started calling the years in this decade "two thousand and something". In the press release for 2001: A Space Odyssey he insisted that 2001 be pronounced "two thousand and one" and not "twenty oh one", popularising the pronunciation.)

All of this speed is quite dizzying. There seems to be a constant barrage of information from everywhere and work, news, the internet, are hard to disconnect from. Most people seem to spend more time talking about celebrities and news stories than they do about their own lives. It's hard to slow down. There were very few lazy days on the couch in the '00s.

With such unrelenting velocity, perhaps as this decade ends, all we can really think is: phew.

umullally@tribune.ie