What are the cultural highlights of the decade?

As we enter the last few weeks of the 2000s, the Magazine is asking readers to tell the story of the last 10 years, based on five themes. Jasper Rees, founder of online magazine The Arts Desk, picks some cultural events and trends.

In years to come, when they look back on the culture of the Noughties, no one will struggle to identify the overarching theme.

This has been the decade in which the professional, the trained talent, has had to budge up and make room.A decade ago, who'd have imagined that the biggest stars in pop would be sourced from a Saturday night talent show?

That they'd be casting West End shows by public vote? Or that a plinth in Trafalgar Square would be given over in hourly slots to anyone who fancied making an artistic statement?

But then reality has been the dominant force of the decade.

While out in the really real world the decade was bookended by terrorist atrocity and financial Armageddon, television tried to keep our spirits up by asking which of us wanted to be a millionaire.

Answer: anyone and everyone who queued to be on Big Brother, X Factor, Britain's Got Talent and reality TV's other offshoots.

The most controversial television show of the 1990s even found its cast of brawling attention-seekers turned into an all-cussing, profanity-packed stage show, Jerry Springer - The Opera.

Not that stardom necessarily came via television exposure. YouTube ensured that anyone could be the leading character in their own room.

MySpace helped a new generation of indie musicians to bypass the music industry's front entrance. And thanks to the rise of the iTunes download, the streaming site Spotify and the consequent collapse in CD sales, they now all have to tour if they want to make money, giving rise to a teeming summer festival culture.

In another blow for democracy, the podcast and the iPlayer allowed people to consume The Office and Little Britain and The Ricky Gervais Show on their own terms, not to a timetable imposed from on high. The viral phenomenon of the internet validated everyone's opinion via social networking and chatrooms.

The big losers of the decade were newspapers. With readers migrating online, they are still wondering how to charge for usage to keep themselves afloat.

As people stopped wanting to pay, the freesheet became a common sight on trains and platforms. If the book trade has remained healthier, it's partly down to the rise of the celebrity confessional, memoirs about childhood trauma and several Harry Potter doorstoppers as much as quirky successes like Schott's Miscellany and Lynne Truss's book in praise of punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Meanwhile, attendances for live performance and museums have never been higher. But even in the higher arts the biggest stories have been about people who have clawed their way up from under.