Happy New Year to all those who visit the Perceptric blog.

I wish everyone who reads the material on this blog the best for 2010.

What will 2010 bring to the world? This is after all the time at which all pundits like to sum up the past and/or predict the future...

We live in times where there are massive changes afoot, even though there are few of us that fully appreciate them. These changes are wrought by the small movements in the levers that are made at the very top of the macro economic and political pyramid.

For me the biggies of these are: Climate Change and all that this entails, including water shortages, crazy weather, rampant fires, and of course that leads into energy generation and storage, because so much of the energy created generates a carbon footprint; then there is Aged Care, because throughout the west on the back of the CFC there is a greater awareness dawning of the cost of care, the lack of funds, and the lack of people to look after those whose working days are past....

There are other related issues that make all of these very complex - they are the economical issues: The fact that the US has a massive debt, and China has massive (3 Trillion) in reserves. And the more that the US looks for and then fights wars, the more it deepens that debt hole.

Very hard to reconcile.

So these big issues are what the policy makers are dealing with, and it is these issues that shape their dreams and nightmares, and it is these issues that they try to address with their policy changes even though they may talk about a lot of other more emotionally charged issues, that are designed to get the voters feeling excited one way or another.

But while these big issues occupy the policy makers there are two incredible forces that are reshaping the way that the ordinary people, the masses, act and react with information. These two forces may be considered trivial by many - I am of course talking about FaceBook and P2P - not Google.... These two social forces, one a corporate entity and the other a piece of code that enables the sharing of information, are going to be the major forces of cohesion in the coming year. They have the capacity to bring a huge amount of people together over a very short period of time - possibly only united by their rejection of the way that the politicians behave and the determinations for social policy that they lay down.

Face Book, and you only have to change one letter for it to become Fact Book, is growing in numbers at a truly incredible rate, but it is not the raw numbers that should interest or alarm the policy makers. It is the way that the networks are morphing. It is the way that more and more of the members are starting to use the tools to disseminate information. And it is the way that people are becoming more engaged in issues that are not trivial. 

I remember when the first browser, Mosaic, was issued and the Internet was still young. I was an executive at BMG and told my superiors that we needed to get ahead of the curve and build web sites and engage with the people who were online. They said to me that I was crazy. This was just a fad and would be of no consequence to the business of selling music. Well, that worked out pretty well for them, didn't it?

FaceBook is the new Internet. And riding maybe behind and maybe in front is encrypted P2P - the way for people to hide what information they share. The big issues that governments will need to deal with and are going to be life changing are not just social networks. That would class them as nouns. They are in reality verbs - they are the doing words of the digital generation. And that is all of us whether we participate or not.

Non-participation in social networks is a bit like not hedging against the fall of the greenback. By sitting on the sidelines you make a decision of sorts, regardless...

I have read some commentators talking about how the environment is going to be the #1 issue for the next few years. On one level that is true, but on another level what will be taking place is a sharing of information that is believed to relevant and true and not currently distributed by the mainstream media.

This sense of not being told the truth is going to be one of the most important social drivers of the next year as it comes to the fore - and you can also bet your life that this concept is also going to drive investment. Because while we may all want to do the right thing by the planet and by each other, on another level there is a continuing and very strong selfish vector that drives decision making in society.

So I can foresee a growth in the use of social networks - Face Book in particular - to spread messages that will have bearing on political decisions... The politicians are quite aware of this as a future phenomenon - Gordon Brown has talked about it. But when we start to see an acceleration in the transmission of important memes it will start to get really interesting...