A few fires started in 2011 that absolutely have not been put out yet, more or less across the entire gamut of “stuff that matters”. Our local mainstream media may have made it look like my fellow New Zealanders were living in some sort of stupor where the only thing that mattered was that John Key had a nice smile and that Dan Carter couldn’t make the footy finals, but that certainly wasn’t what was on the minds of *my* friends. So here is a really quick overview of a few interesting things that are (still) going on at the moment, that you may or may not be aware of.

Media: It’s increasingly clear that you can’t trust what you read. Anyone paying attention has known this for years, but the fact that more people are becoming aware of it indicates things are in for a bit of a shakeup. Or more of a shakeup. 4 more arrests in the Murdoch empire today. And I expect more in the weeks to come. And the impact of the internet on media, both news and entertainment, and increasing hybrids inbetween, is a subject for more books and blog posts than you can possibly imagine. Check out Jeff Jarvis. Or Clay Shirky. Or my friend Richard’s awesome ReadWriteWeb. But one thing I’ve noticed recently is the absolutely hopeless [1] coverage, particularly from the business press, on the world of..

Modern Finance and Macroeconomics: I read economonitor.com fairly often. These people are serious, hard core macro wonks, and they have been saying for months that the entire global economy, excluding more or less nobody, is on the rocks, for a list of reasons that goes on as long as my arm, and so far nobody has convinced anybody that they can see a way out of it. My opinion is that the way out will come from….

Technology: Technologists are making more magic happen every day. Kinect hacks are bringing reality modeling to the masses. 3D printing is bringing computer models to the real world. The internet gets faster every day. Smartphones that cost $1000 a couple years ago now go for less that $100. A smartphone has the sort of sensors on it that would have cost $10,000 or more not very long ago. I could keep on going on this subject for a very long time. But one under reported aspect, I think, is the impact technology is having on …

Politics: The US Congress has about a 9% approval rating. The Arab Spring continues apace. #Occupy are hunkering down for the northern winter but absolutely have not gone away. Incumbents worldwide are under the gun for having apparently failed to do anything at all useful for years, perhaps decades. What people define as “useful” of course, differs. But the key two things, I think, are that

(a) technology is transforming media, and those changes are transforming politics, and politicians who never got around to thinking about these changes are completely out of their depth.

(b) the technologists are making everything vastly more efficient, and that means that there is no way we are ever getting back to having enough jobs for everyone to do their 40 hours a week. It’s bizarre how little everyone talks about that. Perhaps it’s because the people in a position to know are having too much fun playing Angry Birds or marveling at the new advances in such areas as:

Physics. My friend Cathy Neil tells me we’re entering a golden age of Cosmology. This is apparently unrelated to the fact that Einstein may or may not have been wrong, and despite many many pre-prints on the arXiv since the initial OPERA experiment, no one has really ruled out the existence of FTL Neutrinos.

Anyway, I could go on about what 2012 may bring in the areas of Cognitive Science, Climate Science, Energy Efficiency, Sustainability, Eco-Housing, and so on and so forth, but in reality, I have work to do, and will be trying to stop thinking about all this as much as possible for a bit!

(Time to write this post: 30 minutes. Not bad. Maybe I should blog more often.)

[1] Ah, yeah, so my actual views on the business press would take at least another 30 minutes to explain clearly, and to some extent, I know, it’s about the audience. And so on. I may get around to explaining further. Apologies if anyone was offended, and it probably goes without saying that if you got as far as reading this blog post, you’re not one of the journalists I’m complaining about