The audience figures are measured by the number of web browsers used to access the website on any day
A look back at the big
stories on the BBC News website suggests it's been a tumultuous year,
with uprisings across the Arab world, an earthquake in Japan and the
deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Kim Jong-il. But can you instantly know if
a year is going to go down in history, asks author Tim Footman.
As 2011 staggers to a close, it does feel somehow more
momentous than an ordinary year. Regimes have crumbled, despots and
demagogues were toppled, cities blazed and capitalism itself started
looking a bit rough.
Even the speed of light changed, allegedly. Could this turn
out to be a big, historical year to rank alongside 1989 (tanks in
Tiananmen Square, dancing on the Berlin Wall), 1968 (tanks in Prague,
riots in Paris, the death of Martin Luther King) or 1956 (Hungary, Suez,
Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show)?
It's probably fair to say that the top story has to be the
Arab Spring, although as a historical event, it's still a work in
progress. And there are still arguments as to whether it is best
regarded as a single event or a series of discrete revolts; it's fair to
ask if a single Tunisian street vendor had not reacted to official
harassment, would events have played out in the same way.
And there is always the matter of perspective.
If you're not directly affected by events in North Africa or the Middle
East, your own big headlines of 2011 might have been the births of the
seven billionth child or South Sudan, the earthquakes in Turkey or New
Zealand, the elections in Ireland or DR Congo or the deaths of
footballer Socrates or singer Amy Winehouse.
But two facts are clear. One is that there are very few big
stories that remain purely local. The knock-on effects of the tsunami in
Japan forced governments around the world to review their nuclear power
policies. Economic woes in a handful of countries affected the whole
eurozone and beyond. The "Indignant" protesters in Spain set the agenda -
fluid and unfocused as it may have been - for the Occupy movements in
New York and London and beyond.
The floods in Thailand engulfed
dozens of factories making electronic components, which means your next
laptop or phone or games console may well cost more, wherever in the
world you buy it. Followers of British politics will be sick of hearing
it, but we really are all in this together.
The other change is that the way in which we receive and
consume news of these events has become as significant as the events
themselves. The first inkling of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden
came not from President Obama's solemn press conference, but from one of
the al-Qaeda leader's unwitting neighbours in Abbottabad, musing aloud
on Twitter about the US helicopter that had suddenly disturbed his
evening.
As English cities smouldered after nights of guerrilla
consumerism, politicians and pundits debated the logistics of suspending
the social media sites with which marauding hoodies had supposedly
plotted the riots. And how many people first got the news of Steve
Jobs's death via one of his own devices?
Shrines to Jobs appeared around the world after his death
But it wasn't just the speed with which the news travelled, or the
medium that carried it, that made 2011 stand apart from previous big
years.
The news itself, the whole convoluted question of what we
should and shouldn't be allowed to know, hogged the headlines for weeks
on end. Julian Assange went from crusading hero to arrogant, dangerous
weirdo, depending on who was telling the story, but the questions raised
by Wikileaks, of the extent to which governments should be entitled to
keep secrets from the people who elect them, remain live topics.
The super-injunctions saga in the UK prompted smirks and
sniggers - again, many of them echoing around social media sites, which
tend to be less nervous about libel laws - but did raise significant
questions about whether public figures should be entitled to private
lives.
The fires have stopped raging but the debate goes on over what sparked summer riots in England
And then the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's News of
the World, which had been rumbling for years, suddenly burst into public
view, engulfing several careers, dragging several other newspapers into
the argument and alerting us to Hugh Grant's middle name.
There were, as in any year, a number of natural disasters but
in terms of death toll no single catastrophe to compare with the Bam
earthquake in 2003, the tsunami in 2004 or the Sichuan quake in 2008.
That said it's an uncomfortable truth that people in the West have a
more intense reaction to such events befalling advanced, developed
places such as Japan and New Zealand, compared to the response when they
happen elsewhere.
So was 2011 really a big news year, like 1956, 1968 or 1989?
Or is it just that each news story that rolls into view is now
immediately seized on not just by the news media but by bloggers and
Tweeters and Google+-ers who analyse it from every known political and
religious and philosophical standpoint, with a good few conspiracy
theories thrown in, so everything seems bigger and more complex - and
usually far worse - than it might have done otherwise?
And even those who don't see themselves as part of either
mainstream or unofficial media have taken the chance to peek behind Oz's
curtain, to see how politicians and journalists and bankers and
lobbyists have tweaked reality to their own ends.
In the end that - rather than any revolution or riot or
earthquake or media scandal - may turn out to be the biggest, most
historically significant story of the year.
