Source: The Conversation – UK
In this sixth and final part in our series on how the UK has changed in the past 25 years, we focus on tech, culture, religion and entertainment.
Media
Adrian Bingham, professor of modern British history, University of Sheffield
In December 2001 the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology published a report entitled E is for Everything? Public Policy and Converging Digital Communications. With “E” standing for electronic, prefixing everything from email to e-commerce at the time, the report outlined the rapid changes in the world of communications. It noted: “More than seven out of ten UK adults have mobile phones, over a third have home internet access and a similar proportion have digital television.”
It also observed, with a tone of wonder, the trend of convergence: “As faster internet connections become available to home users, it will increasingly become possible to view film clips and television programmes, listen to the radio and to play games over the internet on a home computer”.
How has the UK changed since the start of the century? From Blair to Burnham, from the dotcom era to AI agents, time has certainly not stood still. In this six-part series, a team of some 35 experts look at everything from defence spending to species populations to the rise of populism to try and make sense of the intervening years.
Twenty-five years later, this world has arrived and gone further than the report’s authors could ever have predicted. Indeed, looking back, the digital world of 2001 looks laughably basic: of the 39% of adults with internet access, almost all were using painfully slow dial-up connections.
We can identify four key shifts across the period. First, the UK has witnessed a dramatic decline of the print press. National daily newspapers were at the heart of British public life throughout the 20th century, and in 2001, sales remained substantial: The Sun’s circulation was over 3 million, the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror over 2 million, and even the Daily Telegraph had only recently dipped below 1 million.
Circulation data is harder to come by now, but the UK’s most popular newspaper now is the Daily Mail, with sales of just over 600,000; The Sun sells around half a million copies, the Daily Mirror 166,472, and papers like The Times, Daily Telegraph and Guardian less than that. The print newspaper is very much on life support.
The broadcasting environment has fragmented and globalised. In 2001, for the first time, half of UK viewers had access to more than the five terrestrial television channels, through digital, satellite or cable platforms. It was also the year that Sky launched its first Sky+ television recording box. Nevertheless, the broadcasting environment was still dominated by the big beasts of the BBC, ITV and, to a lesser extent, Channel 4, and governed by the daily schedule.
Twenty-five years later, YouTube has a bigger audience than the BBC, and UK broadcasters are struggling to keep up with the streaming giants of Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and Apple. Viewers are now in charge: they have access to hundreds of digital channels providing more content than they can consume, and they can determine when and where they watch programmes through apps and catch-up services.
Spotify to the rescue?
The music industry has been transformed by streaming. In 2001 CD sales peaked in the UK – some 123 million were sold, more than five per household (the best-selling album was Dido’s No Angel. The threat to physical music sales was already clear, though.
The year also saw the launch of Apple’s iPod, a device offering listeners the ability to store around 1,000 songs in a pocket-sized device, while music executives were increasingly alarmed about the capacity for illegal file-sharing. The industry was saved by the rise of legal music streaming services such as Spotify (launched in the UK in 2009), Amazon Music and Apple Music.
By 2025, almost half of the UK population had access to streaming services, playing over 200 billion digital tracks – only 10% of music consumption was now through physical formats. Here was convergence in its purest form; even iPods died out because mobile phones became the device of choice for music listening.
Finally, and least anticipated by the authors of the 2001 report, social media has transformed the whole media ecosystem. Facebook and Twitter (later X) became open to the public in 2006, Instagram in 2010 and TikTok in 2018.
With the rise of internet-enabled smartphones (Apple’s game-changing iPhone launched in 2007), engagement with social media not only became supremely convenient, it has been hard to resist. As of 2026, 89% of adult internet users are engaged in at least one social media platform, with as many as 97% of 16-34-year-olds doing so. Two-thirds of users admit they sometimes spend too long on their devices, 40% that this happens most days.
In 2001 the UK media environment was still largely controlled by a series of key players, particularly the main broadcasters and the leading newspapers. Twenty-five years later, big tech (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook) and Bytedance (TikTok) operate global platforms that enable individuals to consume, share and sell in their own personalised worlds.
These tech firms are now facing lawsuits alleging that their platforms are deliberately designed to be addictive, just as artificial intelligence is providing cheap new ways to generate endless fresh content. “E is for everything” is perhaps a more timely slogan than ever before.
Entertainment
Andrew Russell, lecturer in film and animation, University of Portsmouth
In 2001 the way we consumed entertainment felt broadly shared. Primetime television drew millions of viewers watching simultaneously, enabling endless discussion around the watercooler. Chart music defined the sound of the year, with compilations such as the Now series collating the most popular songs. Twenty five years later this sense of a homogeneous mainstream has weakened, driven by technological change.
In the early 2000s television scheduling mattered, and competing options were limited. Popular taste was dictated by broadcasters who largely decided what Britain saw, with audiences having few alternative choices. A show like The Office or Big Brother could become a cultural barometer in a way that doesn’t happen so easily today.
By the early 2010s this model was eroding. The rise of streaming services such as Netflix and BBC iPlayer placed less onus on terrestrial scheduling, allowing viewers to shift to a watch-when-you-want approach that encourages binge watching.
Now algorithms push content that services believe we would like. This has the effect of making viewers less likely to step outside their comfort zones. Overwhelmed by the huge number of options available, we tend to stick with what is familiar. Big hits have included teenage crime drama Adolescence (2024), as well as Bridgerton and Stranger Things.
Algopops
Music consumption has followed a similar path. The UK singles chart used to reflect what people were buying in stores. By the mid 2010s, streaming had transformed both how music was discovered and how success was measured.
Artists such as Lil Nas X or Central Cee gained prominence not through being played on radio but by trending on social media. A recent report from TikTok claims that in 2025, all 13 UK #1s had a viral TikTok moment first. Playlists have replaced charts as the primary mechanism of discovery. Just like with TV algorithms, this allows listeners to inhabit highly personalised musical worlds with limited overlap.
Thanks to algorithms, short-form content is playing a more pronounced role in our lives in the 2020s. Viral clips now seem to be as important as mainstream appeal. Social media makes us feel like this is curated, yet arguably we are seeing a flattening of culture. The tech author Kyle Chayka argues persuasively that media consumers now have very little agency because of the extent algorithms dictate our choices.
This has also had a positive effect, though, especially for musicians, with older songs finding renewed interest after viral exposure. Fleetwood Mac benefited from this a while ago, for instance, and the same thing has happened more recently with Dire Straits. Meanwhile in the world of TV, [German sci-fi thriller Dark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) recently went viral nearly ten years after it began.
Film consumption has gone through a comparable transformation. With 68% of UK households subscribing to a streaming service, these are increasingly the first port of call for moviegoers, with the likes of romcom Office Romance (2026, Jennifer Lopez) and the remake of action movie Road House (2024, Jake Gyllenhaal) among the most popular. Cinema attendance dropped from 155.9 million admissions in 2001 to 123.5 million in 2025.
This said, there are indications that blu-ray sales are increasing again with boutique companies such as the Criterion Collection and Indicator on the rise. Some see this as a form of cultural rebellion, with these viewers relishing having a collection on their shelves. Generally streaming is also of a lesser quality than a 4k disc.
Importantly, however, there are also instances where films have been censored on streaming services, from God’s Own Country (2017) having sex and nudity removed to The French Connection (1971) having a racist insult edited out. This feels like an especially pertinent issue with censorship of history seemingly happening in real time.
Lincoln Geraghty, professor of media cultures, University of Portsmouth
In 2001, 23 million viewers were asking “who shot Phil Mitchell?” in EastEnders in what was the UK’s most watched TV show of the year. In the list of the top 50 shows, BBC One took the top two spots, though ITV had the most entries. Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant’s The Office on BBC Two captured the nation’s attention with mockumentary hilarity, while music fans were introduced to pop group Hear’Say (including Myleene Klass), who were created on ITV reality show Popstars.
The two big franchise releases that year were Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. They dominated the box office and would set the pattern for years to come. Book lovers rejoiced in seeing the hugely popular novel, Bridget Jones’s Diary, adapted for the big screen, becoming the most successful non-fantasy film of the year.
Fast forward to 2026 and one might be forgiven for thinking UK audience tastes have not changed that much. Last year saw the release of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth film in the franchise, which received a favourable score of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.
EastEnders showed its continued popularity and longevity by winning Best Soap at the Bafta Television Awards. Peter Jackson recently revealed that not only will there be a new Lord of the Rings film coming to cinemas in 2027 – The Hunt for Gollum – but there will be a second one some time after. It’s got the working title Shadow of the Past and is being developed by recently unemployed talk-show host Stephen Colbert.
By year’s end we will also have a brand-new TV version of Harry Potter made by Warner Bros and streamed on HBO (available in the UK through the likes of Sky and Amazon Prime).
So does this mean that a whole generation later, we have not changed our viewing and reading habits? Short answer: no.
Nostalgia is peak just now. In an era of global uncertainty, audiences are reflecting on more confident times. Through films and series like these, we see characters coming back, franchises rebranded and traditional formats reimagined.
To a similar end, popular offerings like The Great British Bake Off (since 2010), The Great British Sewing Bee (2013) and The Repair Shop (2017) are a shift towards lifestyle television that soothes rather than excites. It allows audiences to reminisce vicariously about food, fashion and favourite objects from their own past.
Having said all that, the types of stories we want to read and watch are similar to those on offer in 2001. Comedy and irony are still present: the American version of The Office (from 2005) was just as big in the UK thanks to Netflix. Romance is still romance, even if it has shifted to include reimagined history in Bridgerton (from 2020) and “romantasy” like the Twilight films (from 2008) and book series A Court of Thorns and Roses starting from 2015.
Tastes are more global as we have greater access to content across multiple streaming platforms and the internet. From Korea we’ve seen drama (Squid Game (from 2021), kids’ blockbusters (KPop Demon Hunters (2025) and music such as boyband BTS. We’ve seen Nordic noir – TV’s The Killing (2007-12) and The Bridge (2011-18) were global hits and adapted for other markets. And Japanese animation has appeared not only in cinemas (such as Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2021) but London theatre, where Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro has been very successful since 2022.
For the past ten years we have been intrigued just as much by retro visions of the 1980s seen in Stranger Things (from 2016) as what the series gave us in terms of horror and science fiction. In 2025 the latest episodes became Netflix’s most viewed Christmas Day offering ever. So even while we are told that audiences are more divided than they have ever been, the combined popularity of nostalgia and global series suggests that less has changed than has stayed the same.
Tech and culture
Steven Buckley, lecturer in media digital sociology, City St George’s, University of London
The internet made the world smaller, faster and more interconnected. It has given us the ability to access everything, everywhere, all of the time. But with this has come a range of issues that have helped make many feel disempowered and disconnected.
Multiple aspects of society have come to feel like a game. One example is the way people seek validation through likes and followers on social media, which has been shown to have a direct effect on their self-esteem. Combined with everything from trying to succeed on dating apps to more recently prediction websites like Polymarket where you can bet on anything, it’s not surprising the public feel disconnected from the real world.
Oleg Elkov
Back in 2001 it was far easier to have collective, watercooler moments through the shared experience of watching a particular TV event. Streaming networks and other digital content have enabled everyone to find content for their own niche interests, and less likely to have witnessed what our friends and family have.
This is especially true of news content, which we receive from an increasingly diverse selection of sources. The difference between younger and older generations is particularly pronounced, with younger people consuming content from a wide array of creators on places like TikTok and Instagram while older people still rely on traditional institutions like the BBC or newspapers.
This speaks to a cultural gap between the generations that seems far worse than a quarter century ago. The old social contract that “if you work hard, you can afford a home and start a family” has been broken in relation to today’s younger people.
Then there is the impending climate catastrophe. Younger people often blame it on older people, while it makes them feel powerless and not listened to, leaving many reporting feeling anxious and overwhelmed.
Large parts of the digital environment are now based upon meta-references and ironic detachment. There is now a generation with a “lol nothing matters” nihilistic mindset, who feel they might as well have a laugh while posting about the downfall of society.
Surveillance society
One final area where our culture has shifted is how our sense of privacy has been whittled down. At the turn of the century, we still assumed there was some level of anonymity online and that we were at little risk of having any of our actions caught on camera.
This changed with people’s willingness to hand over personal data to social media platforms, the introduction of digital IDs, and the fact that everyone now can record a video of anyone out in public. It has brought about a version of Orwell’s panopticon from Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), where not only is the state surveiling you, but corporations and fellow citizens are as well.
Melnikov Dmitriy
Welcome to a world in which young people are now fearful of dancing in public. The looming social media ban for under-16s risks alienating teens further from attempting to find connections within society.
The question our culture has asked us over the past 25 years is “Could I interest you in anything and everything, all of the time?” Most people answered yes. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about the consequences.
Chris Rojek, professor of sociology, City St George’s, University of London
People now regard being attached to their smartphones and tablets as a standard part of getting from A to B. You only have to take a walk along any British street to see this in action.
In universities these devices have become a universal feature of lecture halls and seminar rooms. Here and in so many other parts of society, the first casualty is the art of conversation. Small talk and passing the time of day increasingly takes the form of texting and streaming. Online attention means bracketing out and devaluing physical face-to-face interactions.
Digital data flow has become the arbiter of facts and truth telling. If an authority challenges us for some reason, it is not the quality of our personality but the browsing and messaging history on our smartphone or tablet that is the best line of defence.
Unquestionably, digitalisation can make difficult decisions faster and sounder. But the effective use of the technology also depends upon digital competence. These days in universities we often work on the presumption that everyone has an internet account and a smartphone.
This may make sense when as many as 95% of British people use the internet, and the same percentage are estimated to own smartphones. But this still leaves 2.8 million non-digitalised citizens, most of them aged 75 and over.
Consider further the number of our fellow citizens that are classified as functionally illiterate: one in six adults, over 6 million people. An additional 8.5 million are estimated to have difficulties with reading. They do not have the knowledge or skills to fill in an online medical form, a job application, a council tax or passport document.
When I think of culture and citizenship in 2026 I often find myself concluding that the smartphone and tablet have become a prosthetic device. They enhance our communication skills and have become a precondition for full and effective citizenship. Conversely, they add new exclusionary dimensions to life with others.
Religion
David Voas, emeritus professor of social science, University College London
A question on religion first appeared in the census in 2001 (except in Northern Ireland, where it was being asked already). The results were a surprise: 72% of people in England and Wales selected “Christian”, considerably more than the 54% of adults classified as such by the British Social Attitudes survey in the same year. Perhaps Britain was a Christian country after all?
The census figure was probably inflated for various reasons and said more about the quasi-ethnic character of religious identity than belief or practice. Nevertheless, it led to some exhilaration among church leaders: having consoled themselves with the notion that Britain was at least believing, they now saw some hope that belonging – nominal as it might be – would persist.
That hope did not survive subsequent data collection. The Christian share of the population in England and Wales fell to 59% in 2011 and then 46% in 2021, according to the census. Using a slightly different question, the British Social Attitudes survey put the Christian share below 50% in every year since 2009, with estimates as low as 38% by 2018.
In Scotland, where the wording of the religion question on the census is slightly different and the tick-box options refer to specific denominations, the Christian figure was 39% in 2022; a majority of the population chose “no religion”.
The rise of religious minorities
Although the growth of “no religion” is largely responsible for the Christian decline across Great Britain, there has also been significant growth in minority religious groups. In 2001 just over 5% of the population of Great Britain was Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jewish or other. By 2021-22, the figure was almost 10%. The relative youth of non-Christians means that in decades to come their share of the overall population will rise to at least 16%, Muslims being two thirds of the total, even in the absence of immigration.
Northern Ireland is a case apart: nearly 80% of its people identify themselves as either Protestant or Catholic. Non-Christian religions are growing but barely exceed 1%. Non-religion is also on the rise in the province, however, largely as a result of Protestant disaffiliation, and reached 17% in the 2021 census. The major news is that Catholics now outnumber Protestants for the first time since the partition of Ireland in 1920-22, even using the “community background” measure, which focuses on which religion you were brought up in.
Of course religion is not just about identity, whether strong or weak. Belief and practice are important aspects of religious commitment. Some high-quality social surveys include questions on belief in God, life after death, and so on, and also on attendance at worship services and frequency of prayer. On nearly every indicator, religiosity is waning.
The engine of religious decline is generational replacement, not adult defections. Elderly people who are mostly Christian are dying out, and being replaced in the population by young adults who are typically less religious or non-Christian. Claims that young people are leading a revival of churchgoing caused renewed excitement among some church leaders in 2025, but the story was too good to be true. The evidence shows that the decline continues.
Interestingly, the royal family shows Britain in microcosm. The late Queen Elizabeth was a committed Christian. King Charles is interested in religion and spirituality but famously declared that he intended to be the defender of faith, rather than the faith. Prince William is well disposed to the Church of England (of which he will become the supreme governor) as long as he does not have to attend or think much about it.
In terms of religious change, the royals are just an ordinary family. Britain continues to undergo a long, slow secular transition.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/02/britains-quarter-century-netflix-memes-and-the-supposed-christian-revival/