When clocks strike midnight tonight, we will ring in a new decade, the 2020s.

What a decade the 2010s have been.

As I’ve been consuming some of the year-end/decade-end stories pumped out by other media in recent days, I’m surprised how fast things changed in the past 10 years.

For instance, the iPad was introduced in 2010, which was only three years after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

That reality put the past decade into perspective for me.

I had my first iPhone by at least the beginning of 2008, and once I had gotten my smart phone, it did not take me long to realize how handy the pocket device was.

It encapsulated virtually everything I used to have in my house: library, music collection, camera, photos, television, internet, computer, and, oh, yeah, not just the telephone but also the telephone book.

So, when the iPad came out a few years later, I had a hard time understanding why anyone would need one. It just seemed like a larger version of the iPhone.

Sure enough, however, I purchased an iPad and learned it was a whole lot easier to use than the smaller iPhone or the larger more cumbersome desktop computer.

Both the iPhones and iPads grew throughout the decade with more and more applications to help more people do virtually anything any time anywhere.

“There’s an app for that!” the slogan went.

Fast forward now to the end of the decade, and apparently there is an app for everything — except for an app that can actually make people put down their smartphones and tablets.

Virtually every car you pass has a driver who is either texting on or talking on their smartphone and the roads are much more dangerous places because of it.

Apps for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snap-Chat, Instagram, etc., have changed the way we live in and view the world.

We are always connected and can find out any information we want to know at any given second with a few taps of the qwerty keyboard on any of our devices using whatever handy search app we prefer.

That connectivity has changed the way we shop, the way we eat, the way we communicate with each other, the way we gather and report news and the way we consume and disseminate news.

The great technological shift has had an effect on just about every industry over the past decade and is continuing to have huge effects on the marketplace, workplace and economy.

We are only in the nascent stages of this transformation and have not yet begun to work out how we will live with it. I believe it is similar to the transformation the world underwent after the printing press was invented in 1450.

That change took us from the medieval period to the protestant reformation and the enlightenment, not to mention the industrial revolution and all that ensued in the two centuries since, including the internet, smart phones and tablets and that brings us up to now.

So long, 2010s. Hello, 2020s.

Who knows what lies in store for us over the next decade?

I hope that by the end of this new decade, the world will have learned how to harness all this new technology in more productive ways to make our lives easier and more profitable and to bring us together instead of tearing us apart.

Happy New Year!

Scott Hawkins is editor of The Natchez Democrat. Reach him at 601-445-3540 or scott.hawkins@natchezdemocrat.com.