A New Year in the Media World

A few thoughts from across the Interwebs on the new year:

• Will election year politics cause you to unfriend old friends from Facebook?
  I don’t know about unfriending, but I’ve been known to hide posts…. HT Romenesko.
• No flying cars yet in 2012
  Will this be the meme of the week?
  
  There’s also this from Least I Could Do.And then there’s that old fall-back, We Were Promised Jetpacks…. 
• The First Annual Wonky Awards from Wonkbook
  A great collection of high and low points in DC wonkiness, but you would expect Ezra Klein, a card carrying member of the Juice Box Mafia, to know better.  First annual, indeed. They are the “inaugural” Wonkies.  They aren’t annual till they’re given out the second time.  (Though some would not agree.)
• The Verge gives us a list of best tech books of 2011
  I saw a couple of interesting books here I was not aware of, including Steven Levy’s book on Google, In The Plex.
• Roger Ebert on why the 2011 box office was down.
  HINT: It wasn’t piracy, it was a lack of good reasons to go to the movies.  Hollywood really needs to listen.  Pretending that its problem is piracy is not going to make its problems go away.  HT: TechDirt.
• Not News Dept.: Fox News still on top of the cable news heap for 2011
  Because, of course, you know that the media are so liberal….
• PBS’s Media Shift lists the top 10 media stories of 2011
  Can’t argue too much with these.  Arab Spring and the social media revolutions (Social media didn’t cause the revolutions, but they were a part of it); the death of Steve Jobs (but it wasn’t just the tech world who mourned); and phone hacking at News of the World are their top three.  What was missing?  Rising importance of Al Jazeera English online in the Western world.