Looking Ahead at Tech in 2012

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Atlantic writers survey the biggest stories on their beats See full coverage

The last year has been packed with tech stories: Competition among the tech giants, continuing fallout from WikiLeaks, the explosion of protest media, impending huge Internet legislation, the launch of the iPad 2, Kindle Fire, and a pack of good Android phones, as well as the continued dominance of Facebook and the insurgence of Reddit. We've covered many of these narratives here on The Atlantic Technology Channel, some in perhaps too much detail. Here, we peer into a murky 2012 wherein technological competition will continue to be fierce even as the world economy stumbles along and domestic politics takes center stage.

One thing we do know is that our capacities for computation and communication and control will continue to grow. The constant change in the technology industry makes it fundamentally different from the political world, say. It's never "same stuff, different year" in technology, which is why you should prepare yourself with our list of stories to be on the lookout for next year.

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Alexis C. Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. More

The New York Observer calls Madrigal "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." He co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.

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