The Future of the Internet IV
In all, 895 people responded to our online survey and 371 of them were experts who have participated in our past surveys about the future of the internet.
In this survey, we asked the experts to react to two opposing statements about the direction and impact of the internet 10 years from now – that is, the year 2020. In this report, we cover there answers to these issues:
Will Google make us stupid?
Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years or will there be more control of access to information?
Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?
Changes Ahead
I just spent some time reading through many of the comments regarding the Pew Report questions and I was happy to find that the majority of the comments are well thought through and cautiously optimistic about the future role the internet will play in all our lives. I was not surprised to find that 80% of those who commented believe that new innovative technology, etc., will come out of the blue – basically serendipitous discoveries in new technologies. However, I also found that I was more in agreement with those who believe that writing could suffer given the current technologies that use abbreviated words, phrases and symbols to relay information; one person even noted that writing will resort to “crud” status. The face of literacy will most definitely change as visual avenues of information take over from written forms, it is the first time I have read a reference to “screen literacy” and I will be watching for more information pertaining to how students are learning in the future. I was most interested in Network Neutrality however, and most agree that there will be changes but overall end users will probably not be locked into access tiering with content that is pre-packaged; rather the internet will manage to maintain its user-centric public good focus.