Every year I make communications predictions early in January. This year I got distracted by some interesting client problems, so it’s late January.  But I’m teeing these up now for your delectation, because, well, it’s still the new year. So what are the communications trends, and what are the surprises, for 2014?

1.  The attention span of ordinary employees will continue to get shorter.  Marketers better take note.  You can’t go a whole day now without returning an email, or you’ll get a follow up email asking you if you’ve died or you don’t love the sender any more.  Build more breaks in to every meeting or conference you organize, because otherwise people will take them unilaterally, head down on the smart phones, paying no attention.

Why did I say “ordinary employees?”  Because the attention span of executives has already gotten shorter than the proverbial goldfish.  That’s old news.

2.  Last year, I predicted that 2013 would be the Year of the Woman in Communications.  It’s still happening.  I noticed an interesting trend in that bastion of dysfunctionality, the U.S. Congress:  many of the cross-the-aisle, bi-partisan moments are coming from the (slowly) increasing number of women in that hallowed institution.  That makes sense; the men there have marginalized themselves to nothing.  So as more women take leadership roles, in business and politics, their communications will become more and more central to the public discourse, and that can only be a good thing.  Of course, not all women are reasonable, and not all men are not, but many of the traditional male-female roles have begun to reverse, and that’s going to continue.

3.  Social media will drive the news, as news outlets have become hollowed-out shells, wrecks of their former selves.  This means, unfortunately, that the news will move even faster and become even stupider and more inaccurate as a result.  There will be more and more stories like the ones that wrongly indentified a harmless person as a Boston Marathon bomber.        

4.  2014 is the year of the pendulum swing back to conciliation rather than confrontation in politics.  You read it here first.  I know, I know – this seems impossible.  But I do believe that both Republicans and Democrats have read the polls and have figured out why they’re so unpopular:  because they’re unpleasant and can’t get anything done.  Look for a change.

5.  Baby Boomers will exit the scene at a faster and faster pace, leading to the decrease in people willing to settle for lousy jobs with inhuman bosses doing meaningless work.  More and more people will become entrepreneurs, and embrace the startup scene, hoping to make a difference by working for noble causes and great organizations.  At least, that’s the story they’ll tell on Facebook.  Let’s hope it all comes true.     

Bonus trend.  Winter storms will get names in a desperate attempt to keep people interested in the TV news and its increasingly inaccurate weather.  Oh, wait – that already happened.  What a dumb idea.    

Here’s to 2014! And always remember that authenticity, integrity, and transparency are still the most important communication rules to live by – and they matter most when they’re hardest to do.