It's almost time to bid farewell to 2011, and as is my custom at this time of year, I'm working on a review-of-the-year type programme, and have thus spent the past few weeks reliving 2011 in the form of countless edited DVD highlight compilations of the year's news reports and TV shows. It's like your life flashing before your eyes, but slower and with sunnier locations.

After a while, everything is reduced to an impressionist smear in your head. The protracted battle for Libya becomes a blur of tarmac, sand and black smoke intercut with footage of people repeatedly firing into the air, as if they've declared war on the sky. The August riots resemble a cross between an apocalyptic zombie movie and an unusually depressing edition of Alex Zane's Rude Tube. The economy is just a series of satirically huge numbers scrolling across the screen while a voiceover recites the words "brink … precipice … abyss … void …" over and over again.

Certain trends leap out. Never before have I noticed quite so many people filming stuff on their smartphones during a war. You could see them walking around in the background of news reports on the Arab Spring, merrily gathering souvenir footage of burnt-out vehicles or recently-lynched despots. Still, at least that's history: today the smallest event automatically prompts onlookers to whip out their pocket-size techno-slabs and start filming. A few weeks ago I was flipping through the channels when I caught part of an Ed Sheeran gig on Channel 4. It looked like roughly 50% of the audience was just standing there, pointing little black rectangles in his direction throughout. Play that back and you'd only get a hazy shot of a singing blob. So why bother? It seems especially fruitless since there was a TV crew present, filming the concert in high definition with stereo sound in order to broadcast it later for free. And if it's not about recording the music, but simply about keeping personal mementos, why watch the screen on your phone while filming it? It's like you're not even there, somehow. I can understand wanting to distance yourself slightly during a violent uprising, but during a gig? We're a curious species, when it comes down to it.

Overall though, the most startling thing about the year as a whole is just how densely packed with incident it's been. Last year, a woman dropping a cat in a wheelie bin was notable enough to make headlines across the globe. This year, so much has happened it's impossible to remember it all in one go. Massively significant events just drop out of your memory, only to surprise you again when you stumble across them later. Osama Bin Laden was killed! You'd forgotten that, hadn't you? Don't worry, even the guy who shot him probably keeps forgetting about it too. If only he'd filmed it with his iPhone.

2011 has been like one big end-of-season finale; a climactic episode in which multiple story arcs come to a head. It's used up far too much news for one year. How can 2012 possibly compete? Surely the event cupboard is bare. Unless planet Earth gets attacked by a 200ft Bruno Tonioli robot that screams machine code while copulating with global landmarks – which at the time of writing seems unlikely – it's going to feel like a damp squib by comparison.

But then, maybe if the global timeline's less cluttered we'll start to focus more on what's happening in front of our noses. If it's relatively quiet, David Cameron is likely to start getting it in the neck. If anyone has benefited from an action-packed year, it's him. Every time the shit was about to hit the fan for Cameron in 2011, something spectacular happened somewhere else on the map and he somehow managed to slip away unscathed during the commotion. It's as though no-one genuinely believes he's responsible for anything, in much the same way as no-one seems to blame Ant and Dec for shoving cockroaches up Fatima Whitbread's nose because they're merely the frontmen: similarly the news is a wacky gameshow compendium and Cameron's just one of many presenters. He pops up now and then to complain that some heinous new development is unacceptable and wrong, then slinks away shrugging.

For a short while it looked like he was in trouble during the summer. In July he was in the spotlight over his links with Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks. In August half the country burned down while he posed for photographs with a Tuscan waitress. But by September the economy had knocked him off the front page, and by October it was all about the corpse of Muammar Gaddafi.

I wouldn't be surprised to discover Cameron has been making all this news up: he's paying the media to run entirely fictional stories to distract us whenever he cocks up – just like the fictional military campaign in Wag the Dog but with a bit more variety. If that's the case, then I have a newfound respect for the prime minister: he has a vivid imagination. That nuclear reactor thing in Japan was a bold move. But by using such grand storylines, he has painted himself into a corner. The only way is up. The only way is weirder. If his recent up-yours to Europe backfires in grand fashion, expect the news to announce that the Cern supercollider has accidentally knocked a hole through time and a swarm of pterodactyls has just flown out. Or for a camera crew to discover Santa's toyshop. Or both.