Historians will look back on 2011 as a momentous year, one in which technology and the Internet played a pivotal role, often behind the scenes, but sometimes as the main attraction.

Little Brother's got a camera

Ever since George Orwell penned 1984 back in 1949, people have debated how much power the state should have to record and monitor the activities of its citizens. What no one questioned was that this was essentially a one-sided relationship, with Big Brother doing the watching and we being watched.
Then, starting in late December 2010, but gathering momentum in January and February this year, shaky, but gut-wrenchingly powerful mobile phone videos and photographs of grassroots protests and the brutal reaction of authorities began to emerge from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other Arab countries.
Social media like Twitter and Facebook played a crucial part in organising the protests and in sharing the often bloody outcomes with the wider world via the web, where the footage was seized upon by mainstream journalists and broadcasters.
Just ten months later three despots have been unseated, one murdered in the process, and several others are clinging to power by the skin of their teeth.
Western democracies haven't escaped the ire and scrutiny of their citizens either. In London in August, what began as a protest against the police's shooting of an unarmed man quickly spiralled  into an orgy of looting and arson. Just how instrumental social media were in fanning the flames is debatable, but there's no doubt that many of the compelling images and videos of the riots were captured on mobile phones, and Twitter and Facebook were central to the efforts of ordinary Londoners as the co-ordinated clean-up campaigns and organised themselves into groups to defend their properties from rioters.
Just a month after the London riots, a protest against unemployment, corporate greed and corruption was held in Zuccotti Park in New York's Wall Street financial district. Dubbed “Occupy Wall Street,” it swiftly spread to other cities across the US and the world, thanks almost exclusively to social media.
The often heavy handed response of the police was captured by mobile phone cameras and broadcast almost instantly to millions.  
In less than a year there's been a seismic shift in the relationship between states and their citizens. Little Brother's got a camera now and he's not afraid to use it.

Dude, where's my BBM?

Seldom has the truism, “You don't miss something until it's gone,” been so amply illustrated as by the disastrous collapse of BlackBerry's internet services in October, plunging millions of BBM users across the world into frustrated isolation, many of them for nearly a week. Parent company RIM eventually got to the bottom of the outage, but not before immeasurable damage was done to its already shaky reputation, despite a belated apology and give-away of premium apps.
The outage prompted a huge uptake in cross platform communications applications like WhatsApp and not just amongst BlackBerry owners. If there's something positive to emerge from the débâcle, it's been that many of us have learned the lesson that we shouldn't put all our tech eggs in one corporation's basket.

Cloud cover

The desire not to be at the mercy of one device or entity has, no doubt, also been a factor in the spectacular growth this year of online backup services, or to give them their trendier name, Cloud Storage solutions.
Dropbox, an established player in this field has found itself facing stiff competition from the likes of SugarSync, Carbonite and Box.
If you've never been through the trauma of losing all your data in a hard drive crash without a recent backup take it from me, it's no fun. You should certainly do physical backups to an external hard disk or flash drive. But in the event of a virus infestation, theft or, heaven forbid, a fire you may well lose the external drive along with the computer.
That's when you'll be truly grateful to have all your precious data safely stored in the Cloud.

Dawn of the Droids

2011 will also be remembered as the year mobile phones and tablet computers running Google's Android operating system finally caught up to, and overtook (in popularity, if not profitability) Apple's IOS powered iPhones and iPads.
Google recently celebrated the 10 billionth Android app download, a staggering landmark even allowing for the fact that most Android apps are free or significantly cheaper than Apple apps.
Android owes its ascendancy to sheer weight of numbers, with several big manufacturers now offering phones with droid innards. But there's no doubt that a small, but rapidly growing cadre of Android handsets, led by Samsung's Galaxy SII with its slick interface and gorgeous 4.3-inch screen, are challenging the iPhone's until now uncontested status as most desirable smartphone.
The iPad's place at the top of the tablet rankings is now also under threat, with analysts reporting that Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet, running a highly customised version of Android, is now outselling the iPad. Sure, it's less than half the price of the iPad and lacks many of its features, but it's a state of affairs that would have been unthinkable this time last year.

Finally, 2011 was also the year tech Titan and Apple Co-founder Steve Jobs succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Whether you loved or loathed him, there's no disputing his incalculable contribution, not just to computing and communication, but to movies, through his animation company Pixar, and music, an industry he revolutionised with the iPod and iTunes music store.
By the time you read this the iPhone 4S (Jobs died just hours after its launch) will have been released in South Africa.
Only a fraction of those who pre-ordered it will get one. The rest will have to wait till more stock arrives, probably only in the New Year. And all will be happy to pay premium for the cachet that comes with owning it.
Until other manufacturers are able to inspire such fervour in their customers, Jobs' dream of making idevices the most sought after in the world will remain unchallenged. Could 2012 be the year that changes?