Obama’s successful use of social networking created a vast online community that has changed politics forever. As he said in his victory speech, “I was never the likeliest candidate for office.” That’s an understatement. He had an almost empty political resume, a non-American-sounding name, an African father, a white American mother, and a Hawaiian childhood. Yet by applying social technologies (e.g. blogs, texting, and viral videos) of the Internet to politics, Obama gave new life to that tired political cliché, “change”. He persuaded voters that he embodied that change. "We are the ones we've been waiting for." "We are the change we seek.”

In Simplexity: The simple rules of a complex world, Jeffrey Kluger quotes Cynthia Corbett, an experimental psychologist and human factors specialist for the FAA: “Most airline incidents are extremely survivable.” In Risk: the science and politics of fear, Dan Gardner shows that of decades of extensive research on how people behave in emergencies has consistently found that panic is quite rare. He quotes sociologist Lee Clarke: even when people confront what they consider to be the worst case, they organise themselves to provide succor and salvation to their friends, and even to complete strangers.” Even people caught in the flaming wreckage of downed airplanes, says Gardner, routinely look to the needs of others rather than pushing and screaming their way to safety.

Apollo 13 was NASA’s third manned moon mission. The crew members were commander James A Lovell, command module pilot John L Swigert, and lunar module pilot Fred W Haise. Two days after the launch in April 1970, an electrical produced an explosion that forced the crew to abort the lunar landing and to return to earth. The way in which the crew informed NASA about the problem has entered popular mythology. Swigert: 'Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here.' Duke: 'This is Houston. Say again please.' Lovell: 'Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a main B bus undervolt.' The misquoted phrase, “Houston, we have a problem" has become a catchphrase for any system failure.

2009 started and ended with plane crash scenarios. Millions of people aroundthe world watched in awe in early January 2009 when Captain Chesley Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger III brought the crippled USAir Flight 1549 safely to land on the Hudson River – the Miracle on the Hudson. In June 2009, Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic with 228 on board. And on Christmas Day 2009, an attempt to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 just before it landed in Detroit was thwarted. We are fascinated by plane crashes and near misses. According to an MIT study, The New York Times coverage of plane crashes was 60 times greater per 1,000 deaths than reporting on AIDS, and 1,500 times greater than reporting on auto hazards.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith is probably best known for The Affluent Society (in which he coined the phrase: conventional wisdom), and The New Industrial State. He was an unconventional economist in that he believed that economic activity could not be distilled into inviolable laws, but rather was a complex product of the cultural and political milieu in which it occurs. During the pro-market, small-government, anti-regulation and low-tax orthodoxies of the 1980s, Galbraith’s views were considered anachronistic, but as markets were seen to be increasingly unstable at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st century, his theories regained some of their popularity.