That may sound tough to do — but fortunately, it isn’t impossible.

First, to understand the problem, consider the year’s headlines. From terrorism to protests over police abuse, from the scandal at Volkswagen to global tensions over energy and the climate, technology was central to just about every major news story that came across the wire.

The news often highlighted a failure to grasp the effects of change. For instance, presidential candidates and law enforcement authorities were at a loss to explain how they might prevent terrorists from using social media to inspire attacks around the globe. When they tried to do so, they betrayed an absence of basic digital acumen — see Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton calling to shut down parts of the Internet, a policy idea many experts dismissed as unrealistic, if not impossible.

The media, meanwhile, was blindsided by the rise of movements buoyed by social media. Mr. Trump’s presidential bid, fueled as much by his mastery of Twitter and Instagram as by coverage on cable news, repeatedly foiled pundits’ predictions that he would be crushed by more established candidates. In a different vein, the movement that forced news outlets to begin covering police abuse was driven by an army of activists armed with smartphones. Even its name was a hashtag: #blacklivesmatter.

Then there were the regulators, who fared little better at understanding the implications of technology. Volkswagen’s disclosure that many of its diesel cars had been equipped with software intended to cheat on emissions tests highlighted the power of hidden code, a problem that researchers have warned about for years and one that could grow more pernicious as our household items continue to be transformed into Internet-connected minicomputers.

Officials appeared similarly surprised by the unabated rise of the ride-hailing service Uber, which hires contract workers through an app and whose business model seems poised to worm its way into other industries. Courts struggled to classify Uber’s drivers — were they employees, contractors or some novel kind of gig worker that straddles both categories?