3 Big Stories of 2008

Wotnews.com.au the news arm of Wotif.com has posted the 3 big stories of 2008 according to various CEOs, Gov and Industry leaders. My three were:

The Death of Capitalism (as we know it)

A defining year in financial markets with the emergence of a new species of company that will cause the re-writing of so many economic text books. The “too big to fail” organisation will re-shape the way people invest, the presence of government in corporate share registries and the social and taxation equilibrium of the USA. It’s a new age of taxpayers funding the big end of town’s failures. Will history write it up as another peasants versus kings story? It feels like the tip of the iceberg to me and I’m confident that 2009 will herald an even bigger story than this one.

Heath Ledger

The tragedy of dying young and the elusiveness of truth were both present in the tragedy of Heath Ledgers death. Life shouldn’t be so short and the truth should be told as to why things happen so people can learn from it. However Heaths death just highlights for me that the story told can never be taken as the truth, it’s just someone’s version of the truth and quite often the version of truth that suits their agenda. If it bleeds it reads is the saying. It reminded me that science is nearly always the best reporter despite not being the most exciting one to read. The autopsy results said “We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications”. I couldn’t be help feel that society still over medicates to fix it’s problems. Society continually underestimates the loneliness and trapped state people of fame can exist in. To me this was a pure tragedy and I won’t judge Heath Ledger.

Mumbai

This was a critical event in so many ways. Not even the optimism of potential change in the way the US positions itself globally could stop those still wanting to have a fight. Even with a relatively passive US president elect and the potential for a reduced assertive nature in US foreign policy, it seems terrorists never be happy until their whole region is engulfed in warfare. This is probably the first event that blogging and micro-blogging outperformed traditional media in the time-to-market of live events as they unfolded. Notably Twitter and Flickr furnished the news hungry online consumers with content. Interestingly traditional media seemed to attack these same organisations for exacerbating the problem as terrorist were claimed to be holding twitter accounts along with guns. I’m not sure how they worked this out so quickly and how the terrorist were able to tweet’n'shoot at the same time but the whole blame game seemed to me to smack of Twitter campaign by parties outside of Twitter seemed vindictive fear of this new social journalism than about the truth.