Looking Ahead at Tech in 2012

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.