2013 is just about done and over with. For me personally it was more on the side of rocky road than rainbow sherbet. But beyond the triumphs and defeats I might have experienced, there were a few big trends that materialized this year that I think are going to shape the way we live life going into the new year.

The Unequivocal, Undeniable Death of Online (and Offline) Privacy

2013 ushered in a new era in the way people use technology and the internet to communicate with each other. The experience of being connected with communities and commerce moved from the desktop and laptop screen to tablets and mobile devices — and with that was a surge in total activity — from likes, shares, and tweets to more purchases and money being exchanged on the go than ever before.

And while folks got online more often, they became a lot more social, too. Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr along with all sorts of other social networks saw unprecedented growth this year. It seems like the critical mass required to get the majority of people online and engaging with each other has been reached. So what does any of this have to do with privacy, you ask?

If Facebook Says It, It Must Be So

In October of this year, Facebook made the decision to disable the option for a user to have their profile and updates be unsearchable and off the public grid. That meant that any Facebook user that wasn’t paying attention and had their posts set to anything besides ‘friends only’ would now have their stream of updates be available to anyone that might search for them (which is the majority of the 1 billion monthly users I’m sure). The very notion of your posts are for your friends only quickly disappeared. That was when I decided to buy into the new privacy paradigm and took (almost) all my Facebook posts public. No one really made a big fuss about the monumental change in course — and Facebook got its way.

Combine this shift in policy with the fact that almost half of Facebook’s billion unique visitors are accessing their network from their mobile device and you begin to realize that there is a whole lot of public sharing going on.

Now, my view on the whole thing is that privacy isn’t necessarily dead — it’s just evolving. Friends who know me know that I’m actually an intensely private person — and they wonder how that’s reconciled with the fact that post publicly on Facebook (and by proxy twitter) often and regularly. I tell them that what I post online doesn't encompass all that I’m about — I’m very aware of what I share and the fact that it’ll all be out there in the open — and that what’s going to happen is that people are going to become much more conscious about what they say or do online as the web continues to evolve.

There’s going to be new ways of thinking on what it means to have public versus private information — and while some tech savvy people are going to navigate the system just fine (with apps like SnapChat , and tools like AdBlock , NoFollow, and even The Silk Road, which was recently resurrected) the vast majority of people are going to (or already have) give away their right to privacy online without as much as a peep of protestation.

But it wasn’t just Facebook that killed privacy.

The real Brutus this past year has been the NSA.

Regardless of your political opinion regarding Edward Snowden, one thing is clear — he exposed some of the most widespread and systematic spying on regular (and not-so-regular) people that the world has ever seen.

Back in June, Snowden began releasing information about how the American government and the National Security Agency has been systematically gathering information about private citizens under the guise of national security. While it’s obvious to anyone thats studied any foreign policy that spying for the sake of national security is a par-for-the-course activity, what was so shocking was that this was normal run-of-the-mill America being snooped on.

Snowden eventually exposed a handful of sweeping programs that for all intents and purposes should never have been allowed to exist:

• First there was PRISM, a crazy-huge data surveillance and mining program that snooped on user activity happening on Google, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo, along with a bunch of other internet companies.
• Then came XKeyScore, a system designed to track and spy on the digital activities of foreign nationals by tapping into private email and communication systems. This one seemed more ‘normal’ for the purpose of national intelligence, but boy did it get us into trouble with our friends.
• There was also Tempora, a global program designed to tap into root-level online and telephone traffic without alerting the companies and countries that operated them. The sheer tenacity of reach was unprecedented and it basically meant that pretty much all communications in the developed world were being funneled and listened in on by the NSA.

There were other revelations made by Snowden of varying degrees of OMGness. We’re still in the midst of the aftermath and it’s anyone’s guess what the world of privacy will look like going into 2014 but one thing is for sure — those crazy tin-foil hat wearing folks living in the mountains might have been right all along.

Miley Cyrus and the Untapped Power of Mass Manipulation

Privacy aside — another thing I noticed about 2013 was that this was the year the media, corporations and celebrities finally learned how to wield the power of the internet to get what they want.

Miley Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards this summer was quite a fiasco.

“OMG she’s such a skank, what is she doing?

What she was doing was playing on the fact that everyone and literally their mother was going to be talking about her the next day and probably for months to come. Someone at the Miley Cyrus Incorporated camp realized that while she could try to gain notoritery and fame with her (actually pretty decent) singing and talent, it would be much, MUCH easier to just push out a caricature that would cause sensation and revulsion (along with additional clicks and shares). Looking at searches conducted prior to ‘skank’ Miley taking the stage in August, you can see how her fame literally skyrocketed overnight.

Now a popstar playing on the knowledge that her fans (and stalkers) would follow her every move isn’t a new strategy — but this was the first time I could remember a celebrity wielding the power of Twitter and social media so effectively to control how the masses thought. Like her or not, you probably talked about Miley Cyrus (or Justin Beiber, or One Direction) in 2013.

Celebrities are beginning to understand the power they have to get their adoring fans to move this way or that, and they’re doing so more and more. But it isn’t just celebrities that tapped into the build-a-scandal-and-profit scheme this year.

It’s Always About Ratings, Folks.

I’ve never seen an episode of Duck Dynasty. As far as I knew, it was a show about old-money ducks having power struggles and love affairs (click here if you have no idea what I’m talking about). But apparently it has been a big hit amongst tv-watchers. The cynic in me feels like A&E knew what it was doing with the entire controversy. They did experience a drop in their total viewership for the short period of time they suspended Phil Robertson from the show, but I have a feeling that with his reinstatement just a few weeks prior to the next season starting, that there will be a bump in people watching, if only to ‘spite’ A&E.

Media conglomerates and celebrities learned how to use social media and the internet to their favor in earnest in 2013, and I think that until the majority of internet users get savvy to the methods used to control how they think and feel, that there’s going to be more ‘Twerk’-type incidents for a long time.