I'm old enough to have bought into the promise of a Jetsonian lifestyle by the year 2000, complete with flying cars and robot maids.
As such, the 21st century hasn't arrived yet.

I'd have to say 9/11 - it was really the first continuity-breaking event. For me it was a startling revelation that the inexorable march towards modernity was not so linear after all. I'd thought of the age of enlightenment as the foundation of human society up till that point, and it was a jarringly post-modern experience to see the world of reason relegated to one sphere among many competing mentalities.

I won't believe it 'til I get my jetpack.

Walter Cronkite and his old TV show "The 21st Century" got me all confused. I thought we were there already back in the 60's.

Oddly enough, for me it was December 31st, 1999 -- New Year's Eve. Sitting with dozens of other IT types in our offices, and thousands of others the world over... waiting, waiting for that rollover that would signify that y2k was here.

Had we done all of our program remediation work properly the previous three years? Was the power grid going to fail, and all the ATM machines begin spitting out money, the missile silos empty their loads, and the earth tilt on its axis?

Those first few hours and days of the year 2000 were one big hold-your-breath, cross-your-fingers, should we bend over and kiss it? Thankfully, we all did our jobs pretty darn well and the computer problems and glitches were miniscule compared to what they could have been. As I exhaled deeply, it seemed that the 21st century was going to be okey-dokey.

I'm not there yet. I think part of it is because I'm not regularly hearing/seeing/dealing with the fact that the year is 2009.

And, of course, I don't have that jet-pack, flying car or robot maid yet.

Not 'til a couple months ago, when I was helping run this bookstore event about reading your own teenage diaries. We all got up one by one and read from our old tattered blank books, yellow pads, Trapper Keepers. There were some actual teenagers there. They got up to read from their diaries - and flipped open their phones to scroll back a few months to the diary entries they were looking for.

Oh, right around the time I got my first jetpack --- say, 2002. It's amazing how cool I thought it was; now that I have the iJet, my first jetpack looks pretty clunky!

Google Earth.

Google Earth, yeah. It is coming in drips and drabs, not one big revelatory moment. But getting on the Internet for the first time, in 95 or 6 maybe. Having my first website. Having a PHP / dynamically generated website. Seeing that TED talk yesterday about 6th sense... And then contrasting it, thinking about the "male gaze" of magazine ads, and realizing I haven't seen magazine ads like that for years, because I live on the Internet now. It used to be there was information you couldn't access, and now Google tells me everything.

700c studded snow tires. Modern times have arrived! Technology! I have freed myself from the gas-powered devices of the 1900's at last.

May 2, 1982.

Wait a minute... were you even born yet, Kate?

Wait a minute... were you even born yet, Kate?

buzzman.... I'm still on 27s and 28s.

There's also this squirrel in the park, with half a tail. And a black squirrel. I don't see too many black squirrels. Lunch on a good day is a fruit or two (pear, apple, bananananana, peach, strawberries), and salted peanuts in the shell. And a good beer. Beck's or Boddington's lately. And half a gross of push ups, and ewww gross of abs. Lunches like these, in the park. FTW this IS the new age. The squirrels are fun to feed. So calming and relaxing. So pleasantly brainless, plain, and simple. Oh yeah modern.

For me, on reflection, I think it was three websites: geocaching; that site where you could register books and leave them in a public place to be found; and wheresgeorge.com. I think all of them started back in the 90s, but they were the germination for ideas about the true power of the internet.

Also 9/11, but pi already said that one.

Hey you guyz, have you heard of a computer network called "Internet"?

What will this proposed network offer Canada?

One word as an answer: computers.

Election night, 2008.

File sharing.

Ten years ago, you would have needed to be a millionaire to enjoy as much access to music as I have today for free.

Seems to be about 45-65 years off to me. The Sarajevo assassination, decline of the British empire and rise of American empire and the IMF/World bank still all seem to be in the driver's seat.

I think I'm too young. It's always felt like it to me.

About 3am on 1/1/00.

Yes, I know that's mathematically incorrect and stuff, but drugs were involved.

9/11 for me, at least in a "this is a new era" or an "everything changed" sense.

The first cool 21st-century technology for me was in the social media and Web 2.0 space. There was so much new stuff all the time for a couple of years there and it was after the dot-com crash. It's amazing how quickly it becomes annoyingly commonplace.

For me it was much earlier -- 1989 when the walls came down, or 1990/91 when the Baltic states declared independence and the USSR grudgingly said "Okay" and then collapsed.

Sometime between then and Somalia, we arguably stopped having the problems and crises of the 20th century and started having the problems and crises of the 21st.

Sometime between then and Somalia, we arguably stopped having the problems and crises of the 20th century and started having the problems and crises of the 21st.

Kind of like the argument that the 20th century didn't really begin until WW I

"Kind of like the argument that the 20th century didn't really begin until WW I" I'm still sticking with it ain't over yet.

Wait, the 20th century ended and nobody told me? When did that happen?

Obama being elected. :) Everything else was just rehashing and waiting to get old.

Yes, Obama being elected, and also the financial crisis. It feels like the start of something new, though we don't know yet what form it will take.

September 11 just served to remind me that we aren't all in the same century. I mean, on one hand we've got people using nineteenth-century tactics and twentieth-century technology to recapture the glories of the fifteenth century; our response was straight out of the late nineteenth, press-and-policy-wise, peppered with eleventh-century justifications and rhetoric. The military deployment is arguably twenty-first-century in its unprecedented and shallow reliance on technology over good soldiering and command structures; if failures like the diversion of troops into a war of opportunity hallmark twenty-first century warfare, maybe we should quit while we're behind.

China's in the nineteenth century and is battling to bring its colonies from their preferred fourteenth-century culture into the grime and soot of industrial revolutionary exploitation.

Maybe it's all just a feeling that, from individuals to nations, the world's divisions and our awareness of them have developed to a point where we are none of us on the same page, all faced with distinct and individual problems compounded by the simultaneous overlay of aspects of different centuries imported from or exported to different places. What a mouthful.

Personally, it started to feel like the twenty-first century in 1980, when my dad gave my brother a Sinclair ZX80 (3.25 MHz CPU, 1 KB RAM/4 KB ROM) and I saved my first computer program to the cassette tape drive:

10 PRINT "HUGH"
20 GOTO 10

The demise of the Soviet system was big, too. That and the repeal of the Glass-Steagal act, which set up our current "you big dummies" economic moment.

But sometimes I don't think we've really even entered the first act of the twenty-first century; unless we're doomed to a hundred years of paying for the greed of the late twentieth, what is yet to come will define what we see, in eventual retrospect, as the defining characteristics of the new century.

I sure hope so.

I started a new job in January, 2001, so that was it for me. It signified a lot of new beginnings, really--a real explicitly internet related job at a big old creaking institution, a job I'd really pushed hard for, and that paid well and carried a certain cache in certain circles (and one that I still have, by the way). I've seen my work site go from 250,000 hits a day to 2,500,000, even though we're still limping along using old technology, and I'm seeing all sorts of new and exciting things coming.

Another sign that this is a new world is, I guess, how my daughter absolutely takes the internet for granted, and uses it so very casually, when it was non-existant, then only gradually existant, for me. I mean, for her, it's like color TV or the telephone or something, just assumed that it has always been here and always will be.