redictive assessments of the future
influence of the internet on societal institutions were
assembled from a select group of 1,286 Internet
stakeholders in the fall 2004 Pew Internet &
American Life Predictions Survey. First, the
participants were asked to rate (on a scale of 1 to 10)
a list of institutions in regard to their likelihood
for change due to the impact of the Internet. They were
told that 1 represented "no change" on the
scale, while 10 represented "radical
change."
Some respondents chose to
supplement their rating of institutional impact by
accepting the invitation to write about their point of
view; many did not. Some respondents chose to identify
themselves with their answers; many did not. We share
some, but not all, of the responses here. Workplaces of
respondents whose reactions are listed below are
attributed here only for the purpose of indicating a
level of internet expertise; the statements reflect
personal viewpoints and do not represent their
companies', universities' or government
agencies' policies or positions. Some answers have
been edited in order to share more respondents'
replies. Below is a selection of the many carefully
considered responses to the following question:
There will be a move toward networked individualism -
where people link to each other as individuals - and away
from groups - in work, neighborhoods, kinship and even
households. - Barry Wellman, University of
Toronto
As broadband proliferates, the access to information,
services and applications by households and institutions
with relationships to households (schools, communities,
governments, marketers) will deliver on the promise of
the internet as a personal-productivity tool as well as a
communications/information resource. - Mike Kelly,
America Online
We will be free to create, share, and organize
untethered - using enhancements that in the past were
enshrined in revered spaces, devices and times. -
Christine Geith, Michigan State University
Cultural infrastructure will change the most.
Alternative media made possible by new technologies will
continue to drive change in both the producing and
distributing sectors of radio, TV, the recording industry
and film. - Fred Hapgood, Output Ltd.
Anything that has involved an intermediary will be
changed. New kinds of intermediaries will emerge, but the
old ones - especially in businesses that have created
high margins by being in the middle of transactions -
will find their very existences at risk. - Dan
Gillmor, author of "We the Media" and
technology writer for the San Mercury-News
One of the biggest changes the Net will bring in the
next decade will be a new way of doing journalism, with
media companies being watched by the producers of weblogs
and citizen media trying to co-opt their efforts in some
way. The Net is one of the last bastions of independent
journalism, so media companies will try to dominate
online while smaller players work the niches. - Mark
Glaser, Online Journalism Review, Online Publishers
Association, CMP TechWeb
The Internet has thrown open the floodgates for
participatory news and information, allowing individuals
to aggregate information from a broad range of sources,
truthsquad what they collect, burrow deeper on topics of
concern or interest, and take action on that information,
if they so wish. - Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab,
The Institute for Interactive Journalism
The relationship between politics and media will
continue to change and affect how people learn about and
choose their leaders. The leveling of access to
information will make some people remarkably
well-informed and others remarkably misinformed, and
unless we push to train young people in critical thinking
skills this could become dangerous. - Cynthia
Samuels, Center for American Progress
The biggest changes, as always with new media, will be
metaphorical. It's not that anything in particular
that we do on the Internet is so important - it's
that behaviors we have online can serve as models for
behaviors that change in real life. - Douglas
Rushkoff, author
Governments will tend toward democracy. Transportation
will be refined through massive substitution of
communication. The current flight to cities will be
reversed. The Internet won't be in schools; it will
replace schools. Television channels will be replaced by
video blogs and Dan Rather will be dragged off the set.
- Bob Metcalfe, Polaris Venture Partners, Ethernet
originator and former InfoWorld columnist
There will be greater use of open development processes
for technology, as in the World Wide Web Consortium or
the Internet Engineering Task Force. There will be
greater separation of people from direct social
interaction, leading to decreasing skill in social
interaction and more social and organizational problems.
There will be greater offloading of work tasks from
organizations to their customers (e.g., do-it-yourself
websites) with less and less human help or customer
service available. - Peter Denning, Naval
Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA; columnist for
Communications of the ACM
A significant percentage of the world's population
will have access to the Internet wherever they go within
the next ten years ? this presents a radical potential -
however, that potential's realization depends on how
people and their governments take advantage of that
opportunity. With Internet- and mobile-phone-organized
collective actions instrumental in choosing the heads of
state in the Philippines, Korea, Spain and the USA, it is
clear that activism and electoral politics are already
undergoing radical change. With the emergence of new
models of production and distribution, cultural
production is undergoing equally radical changes. The
education system, the military establishment and the
workplace are full of big institutions that change slowly
- but as we have seen in the past 10 years, people find
ways around the slowness of big institutions. -
Howard Rheingold, Internet sociologist, writer,
speaker
One of the greatest areas of change concerns communities
of shared interests. The Internet enables us to find
people with similar interests: dogs, diseases, hobbies,
musical tastes, etc. These on-line communities are a
vital resource of knowledge that is easily accessible.
Connecting people of shared interests and bypassing any
gate-keeping filter creates the opportunity for radical
communitarian "open source" exchange of
information, ideas and resources. This has a potential to
subvert a business model that isolates people and makes
them dependent on fee-based exchanges. - Andy Opel,
Dept. of Communication, Florida State
University
The most radical changes will likely involve the
workplace, because of the economic incentives involved,
and processes of artistic creation, because the Internet
is such a fabulous new medium of creation and
distribution. I hope for real-but-more-modest gains in
the contribution of the Internet to our democratic life.
- Peter M. Shane, author of "The Electronic
Federalist: The Internet and the Electric
Institutionalization of Democratic Legitimacy," in
the book "Democracy Online: The Prospects for
Political Renewal through the Internet"
(2004).
The institutions and endeavors most amenable to change
are those that are most readily affected by ease of
communications and the capacity of ordinary individuals
to reach a public audience without intermediation by
government or corporate or other ingrained institution.
They would include also those that currently require
large bureaucracies to process information - such as
healthcare ? Opportunities for individual writers and
teachers and artists of all kinds to find an audience and
thus a livelihood will steadily increase and make the
culture much more creative and productive. The trends in
peer-to-peer, business-to-business and
business-to-consumer on-line interactions will continue
and move toward seamlessness. The models of eBay and
Amazon and Google and Yahoo will continue and become part
of the mobile, wireless network with each individual
empowered by continuous access to information and a
network of workplace and entertainment that is both
instantaneous and globe-spanning. - William B.
Pickett, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
It will take several years for the players to get their
acts together and re-engineer mass-market-access products
and services for reliable and safe use by ordinary human
beings. It will then take several more years to overcome
the growing backlash. Radical change will therefore only
begin to happen towards the end of the decade. It need
not be that way but the current state of denial is that
it looks as though it may. One of my uncles had a mobile
office in the early 1950s (World War II Army-surplus
wireless equipment), and I was using non-internet e-mail
(IP Sharp time-sharing service) in 1977. The pace of
change to date has been greatly exaggerated. - Philip
Virgo, secretary general for EURIM, the UK-based
Parliament Industry Group; IMIS, the UK-based
professional body for management of information
systems
Students are likely to be increasingly dissatisfied with
conventional approaches to teaching and learning and to
the limited resources available to them in all but the
best-equipped schools. In the final analysis, schools
would do well to heed the Latin writer Seneca's
words, which ring as true today as when they were written
nearly 2,000 years ago: "The fates guide those who
go willingly; those who do not, they drag." -
Douglas Levin, policy analyst, Cable in the
Classroom
The Internet ? changes the way [medical] clinicians
communicate with one another, including consultation
specialties; it transforms the way patients and providers
access and share information; it lowers barriers of the
paper world, making it possible to patients to see their
records online and be more involved in their health care;
it offers additional channels through which care can be
delivered to patients; because of this, it will force new
models of licensing healthcare professionals, to permit
us to deliver care at a distance; it will also force us
to change the way clinicians are remunerated, to include
non-visit-based care; the Internet will increasingly
change patients' expectations of the clinicians, so
that physicians will routinely need to offer services
like e-messaging, instant messaging, video conferencing
and other online services. - Daniel Z. Sands, Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical
School
Public health has the potential to change the most, with
the widespread dissemination of public health information
via the Internet (and eventually to the mass media), the
earlier detection of the spread of communicable diseases,
and the ability to treat people remotely - all increasing
significantly in the next decade. - Charlie
Firestone, The Aspen Institute
The Internet shall break down the significance of the
nation/state as we know it today, and what will we see is
the rise of the sovereignty of the individual. We shall
also see the rise in impact of groups of individuals in
every area, beyond what we have already seen. Changes in
entertainment shall respond to the individual as well as
to groups of individual who may or may not know each
other. Education shall change to an individual-driven
endeavor, where knowledge is knowable by impetus of the
individual, and the presumed authority of teachers shall
erode. A new role for teachers will emerge. - Moira
Gunn, Tech Nation - technology commentator
Nearly everything will change because of the Internet,
and especially as the Internet becomes ubiquitous and
all-pervasive, different from the discrete experience it
is now on a computer. The "always-on" Internet,
combined with computers talking to computers, will be a
more profound transformation of society than what
we've seen so far. - Gary Chapman, LBJ School of
Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin
The Internet opens communication channels. Each one of
us as a leader must put truly helpful content on those
channels and responsibly move it forward in a direction
for the benefit of many ? the world doesn't need to
get more complex. In fact, there can be less clutter and
more efficiency in all areas. The world could use more
creativity to move us forward through the portal of the
next decade. - Victor Rivero,
editor/writer/consultant; former editor of Converge, an
education-technology magazine
Telecommuting already has begun to happen in a big way
in white-collar professions. For better or worse, most
research - by academics as well as students - takes place
on-line. There is at least some possibility for expanded
informal "publishing" on-line, though it is not
clear how seriously this is taken. Families, friends and
colleagues hang together much more through the Internet
than through the lost art of written correspondence or
voice - as seen by the fact that my adult children answer
emails immediately and phone messages in a week (if at
all). Opportunities for interaction with foreign
colleagues are much greater, since the Internet obviates
problems of both cost and time zones. - Mike Botein,
Media Center, New York Law School
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. The Net will wear away
institutions that have forgotten how to sound human and
how to engage in conversation. - David Weinberger,
Evident Marketing Inc.
The greatest changes will occur in the arena of trust
and human relations. The Internet makes it so easy to
obtain, store and retrieve the most intimate details of
our lives that people will inevitably exercise a certain
pre-emptive caution or self-censorship even in their most
personal relationships ? [When] the Internet and
electronic technologies seem completely unremarkable, our
notions of privacy and personal space will have been
irrevocably transformed ? When we reach the point where
adults have always understood that their electronic
footprints are subject to extensive unwanted tracking and
storage, risk-taking behaviors will become rarer, to the
impoverishment of our lives as individuals in
communities. - Lois C. Ambash, Metaforix
Incorporated
We are at the point where applications will mushroom for
individuals and organizations. In particular, individuals
will have 24/7-access to communications, education and
information with the proliferation of a new generation of
small, portable, wireless-access tools. Full integration
of voice recognition will make the Internet both
accessible to a larger audience and considerably more
human-friendly. - Bill Eager, professional speaker on
uses of the Internet
News media, politics and governance promise to change
the most thanks to the all-publishing, all-connecting
nature of Internet communications. The most obvious
effects on news media are the rise of weblogs supplanting
the public's attentions to traditional news media,
and the slow death of newspapers ? We can expect the
nature of socio-political interaction to change as well,
potentially changing the way prospective voters make up
their minds - or even how frequently and consistently
they vote on any given race or cause ? However, the
digital divide will grow ever deeper, as computer-savvy
citizens enjoy the fruits of this development, while
non-users (by reasons of choice, ignorance or poverty)
are left to deal with metaspace government representation
that will dwindle as more resources are poured into
online solutions. - Mack Reed, Digital Government
Research Center, USC
The next 10 years will see explosive growth in social
networking applications, collective work applications and
visualization. - Susan Crawford, Policy Fellow with
the Center for Democracy & Technology
Business will continue to both drive change online and
be driven by it. Medicine will utilize new technologies
in perhaps the most dramatic way - in saving lives,
extending lives, and making lives better. And as those
worlds evolve, they will naturally bring along politics
and government, the media, and educational institutions -
those who study and respond to these trends as a matter
of course. - Brian Reich, Mindshare Interactive
Campaigns, Boston; Mouse Communications
Connections across media, entertainment, advertising and
commerce will become stronger with future margins going
to a new breed of digital-media titans. These companies
may not come from the traditional value chain; they will
be far more aggressive than existing players. The
incumbents are not moving fast enough. Well-branded
innovators such as Google and Starbucks have a chance to
build all-new distribution models tied to ad revenue and
retail sales. - James Brancheau, vice president,
Gartner
Media and Entertainment industry impacts: Ubiquitous
broadband network and P2P connectivity, combined with
Internet-enabled technologies and behaviors will continue
to reshape the media and entertainment industries and the
legal frameworks under which they have operated ? Legal
and technological controls will not be effective; new
laws and technologies designed to maintain centralized
control of content will fail to stop ingrained sharing
behaviors. After the novelty: The percentage of content
purchased vs. content acquired through sharing will
eventually return to proportions resembling pre-Napster
after the novelty and binge effect wear off. - Terry
Pittman, America Online, Broadband division
The business community is getting a better handle on how
information is being consumed. That fact is beginning to
take the guesswork out of convergence. As a result the
technology product and service offerings in the future
will be more targeted. Some markets will grow very
quickly and others that seemed to have potential will
fade away. In short, the consumers of information
products and services will drive the next wave. However,
as society becomes more sensitive to the loss of privacy
and actually faces the mountain of information that will
become available, there will be blowback. Technologists
will have to incorporate social concerns into the
innovation process or revenues gained on productivity
improvements will be lost on product fixes at the end of
the commercialization cycle. We will no longer be able to
create technology products in a clean room void of
societal interest. The consumer will be heard one way or
another. - Bradford C. Brown, National Center for
Technology and Law
The entire concept of information freedom will be
profoundly impacted. I do not refer to price, but to the
free flow of ideas; to the expectation that information
can be located and accessed as never before. -
Michelle Manafy, Information Today, Inc., EContent
magazine & Intranets newsletter
The Internet has created information demand that
traditional publishing technologies are not capable of
meeting ? Search technology has changed the way
information is presented and sorted. Editors have lost
the control they traditionally wielded over the
presentation and selection of news ? Some are predicting
the rise of "citizen journalism" provided by
the man in the street using digital technology. I'm
not sure most "citizens" are that interested in
being news providers and reporters, but one thing is very
clear: the news is becoming interactive. It is no longer
a one-way conversation. - Janice Castro, assistant
dean, director, graduate journalism programs,
Northwestern University
It will change the job of every knowledge worker,
because it will continue to make more knowledge more
readily available. - Reid Ashe, CEO Media General
Inc.
As an ever-increasing share of transactions become
digital a whole host of functions now performed by paper,
phone and in-person, many of them by middlemen, will
become digital, lowering costs and freeing up labor. To
take just one example, buying a home could be transformed
from an expensive paper and person-intensive process to
an inexpensive and streamlined digital process. - Rob
Atkinson, Progressive Policy Institute (previously
project director at the Congressional Office of
Technology Assessment)
Power was once reserved for those with a lot of money -
major corporations, special interest groups, and
political parties. Now anyone with a computer and an
Internet connection can make his or her case to the
masses. As the grassroots flexes its muscles, the balance
of power will shift - not only in the U.S., but
internationally as well. - Cheryl Russell, New
Strategist Publications, author of "The Official
Guide to the American Marketplace" and
"Demographics of the U.S.: Trends of
Projections."
Organizations of civil society in countries undergoing
varying degrees of democratization will benefit the most.
The Internet will have a significant impact in the Middle
East over the next ten years in terms of empowerment of
formerly marginalized sectors, particularly for women. I
predict less of a change in Western democracies, where
certain processes and realities have been imbedded into
political and social systems and thus the change will be
less. - Michael Dahan, Ben Gurion University of the
Negev, Israel, (he leads projects to foster peace in the
Middle East through new technology).
Political and governmental organizations will change the
most, as they have changed the slowest so far. In a
decade, they will have returned to a more representative
role, contrasting with today's misguided elite-biased
misinformation, biased today by listening more to
broadband users than the narrowband or offline. - Dan
Ness, MetaFacts, a market-research firm that solves
customer challenges for high-tech companies such as
Advanced Micro Devices, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett Packard,
IBM, Microsoft
The Internet will erode individual privacy. It does
nothing so well as remember the data that users post. The
advent of the Net marks the beginning of wide-scale,
self-initiated surveillance. - Thomas Claburn,
InformationWeek (formerly at New Architect, Wired and
KQED-TV)
The workplace will have the largest change, because it
needs the largest change. The whole notion of
''going to work'' is one of the newest of
civilization's innovations. The only reason people
''go to work'' in offices is because
that's where the paper is. Large companies used to
work out of people's homes, viz., the great trading
houses of Amsterdam, which were really houses.
Lloyd's of London was a coffee shop where the
underwriters congregated to make deals; it only became a
skyscraper when they needed a place to put the paper. The
''paperless office'' is a pipedream, but
the mandate for people to congregate physically will be
greatly reduced by the Internet, which will have as
profound a long-term effect on the development of cities
as did the automobile. - Mike O'Brien, The
Aerospace Corporation, formerly of RAND.
The greatest change is likely to be on individuals and
the way they perform their work. A growing segment of
business needs no longer be at a specific location ? The
impact on the individual, where he/she lives and works,
will alter the structure of our cities, the environment,
and much of our society. - Ted Christensen,
coordinator, Arizona Regents University, overseeing
development of e-learning at Arizona's three public
universities
There doesn't seem to be any original thought out
there anywhere, and I think the Internet bears a
responsibility for this that will only increase in the
coming years. - Tom Egelhoff,
smalltownmarketing.com
The Internet will become even more organic. Wires will
fade and the 'Net will be more like a utility -
always on. Every device that computes will be capable of
connecting, and generation Z will assume connectivity.
- B. Keith Fulton, vice president, strategic
alliances, Verizon Communications, formerly a senior
telecommunications policy analyst with the U.S.
Department of Commerce IPv6 Task Force
Any institution that chooses to ignore or underestimate
the ''user drives'' aspect will suffer
adverse consequences ? The current regime of copyright
protection is an impediment to society moving forward in
leveraging technological benefits and furthering creative
works. Other impediments are legacy
''entitlement'' arrangements of
traditional media, proprietary exclusionary technologies,
regulatory systems that respond more readily to corporate
lobbies than demonstrating responsibility to social
principles. If there is another lasting lesson that the
Internet has brought it is that change is persistent and
unavoidable. It is better to be actively, thoughtfully
and humanly adapting technology than to be creating
inertia to resist it. - Sam Punnett, president, FAD
Research, Toronto, Canada
The Internet will significantly impact the channels
through which people around the world get news and
information; existing powerful channels will diminish,
and new online social networks will evolve and deliver
news to people much more organically in the course of
their daily lives. We are seeing the
''Blogosphere'' starting to impact
traditional news channels in this fashion - becoming a
catalyst for creating and driving the news, speeding up
the news cycle, and delivering critical real-time news
and information across millions of touch points. -
Lyle Kantrovich, Internet usability expert, Cargill/also
known for his blog Croc o' Lyle.
The Internet allows small units of thinking to access
the larger public audience. Language and ethnic
minorities political groupings like Greens or religious
fundamentalists neighborhood political advocates distinct
territories, and even individuals like the Baghdad
bloggers or Matt Drudge, can publish and converse with
the larger public. This will continue, despite efforts by
the media companies to prevent it. There is too much
momentum behind the decentralization movement already.
- Mike Weisman, Seattle attorney and activist in the
advocacy groups Reclaim the Media and Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility.
All institutions, all endeavors that rely on the
exchange of information will feel the increasing impact
of the Internet. The key is to separate the Internet from
the World Wide Web. The Internet is truly the
revolutionary delivery vehicle; the Web merely an early
indication about how looking for information, finding
information, publishing information, sharing information,
selling information and even defining information will
change in the future. - Howard I. Finberg, director,
Interactive Learning, The Poynter Institute for Media
Studies
Actually, I do not believe that institutions and human
endeavors will change ''because of'' the
Internet. I do not believe in technological determinism.
To me, the Internet is a tool, a catalyst and not the
cause. Technology never emerges independently from its
social context; some technologies emerge, others, whose
scientific qualities were at least as good, do not; in
fact, we collectively choose the technologies which we
(subconsciously) believe will enable us to live the life
we have chosen for ourselves. The Internet ? is the tool
for maintaining or re-creating social and functional
links in an increasingly individualistic society, where
everyone's rhythm is disconnected from everyone
else's. It is basically a tool for
re-synchronization, or for managing our independence
without transforming it into loneliness. Therefore, the
answer to your question is: Everything and nothing [will
be most transformed] ... However, it seems clear that all
activities which can be entirely digitized, from creation
to distribution, will change the most. That goes for
news, entertainment and many services. - Daniel
Kaplan, founder and CEO, FING (France's
Next-Generation Internet Foundation) and chairman of the
European Institute for e-Learning, EifEL.
Two counter-movements [are] pushing stridently against
each other ? One movement is related to radical
democracy, distributed systems and open source. It is a
force for the distribution of power among the many, viral
replication of memes and other forms - activity similar
to the asymmetrical warfare tactics of al Qaeda, to be
specific, but also resembling the decentralization of
solar energy, of people working with alternative power,
going off the grid, defying convention ? The opposing
move represents something of Marshall McLuhan's media
reversals. It attempts to use information technology and
networks in a panopticon function, leaning toward
increased central control and monitoring, and crunching
all activity - both at the granular level and at the
statistical mass level. It is an authoritarian backlash
to the openness of the Internet and an attempt to put the
genie back in the bottle. And it could be successful. The
technology supports the success of this movement, but the
activity of participants online provides resistance,
building distributed forms into the politics of
interfaces. Unfortunately, these distributed forms and
open interfaces also facilitate panoptic monitoring and
may seemingly undo their own advances. It is a bold move,
not to fight fire with fire, but rather to combat control
with greater openness instead of going into a secret
underground, to avoid becoming the fascist in order to
fight the fascists. While idealistically pure, it could
be doomed to failure. It is a fascinating struggle. -
Christine Boese, cyberculture researcher/CNN Headline
News
I've been most amazed by the change the Internet has
already had in my own family life: my wife and I
don't talk any more; we just forward interesting
email to each other ? The Internet is an incredible
medium for sharing and communication, and who do we want
to share and communicate with more than our own families?
The other people we share and communicate with are our
coworkers, and I think the second largest impact will be
there. The internet will impact both how people work in
the same company or location, but also change the
economics of sharing across companies or borders, not
just changing the workplace, but even changing economies.
- Joshua Goodman, Microsoft Research
Globalism: The global distribution of information and
knowledge over the Internet at lower and lower cost will
continue to lift the world community for generations to
come ? A better-informed humanity will make better
macro-level decisions, and an increasingly integrated
world will drive international relations towards a global
focus. Attachments to countries will marginally decrease,
and attachments to the Earth as a shared resource will
significantly increase. Communities: ? Local communities
will organize in virtual space and take increasing
advantage of group-communication tools such as mailing
lists, newsgroups and web sites, and towns and cities
will become more organized and empowered at the
neighborhood level. At the same time, communities will be
as profoundly affected by the capabilities the Internet
is bringing to individual communications, providing
individuals in the once-isolating city the ability to
easily establish relationships with others in their local
area by first meeting in cyberspace ? Internet
applications will change expectations of geographically
oriented community organizations, and provide
increasingly wide choices. - William Stewart,
LivingInternet.com
The institution of education and the way our
intelligence will evolve will continue to change from the
Internet. The access to information from anywhere/anytime
will no longer will define knowledge based on memory but
on ''how'' to find information and how to
put it into context. - Tiffany Shlain, founder, The
Webby Awards
And the following are from predictors who chose
to remain anonymous: [Workplaces of these respondents
include Intel, Oracle, Jupitermedia, MIT, Microsoft,
RAND, MSNBC, The Institute for the Future, The Charlotte
Observer, Harvard Business School, IBM, AT&T, France
Telecom, Hewlett Packard, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,
Centers for Disease Control, Razorfish, CNET, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, and
others.]
Several trends will shape the next ten years: the
extension of the Internet beyond the PC to reach the
sensors, actuators and other embedded computers, the
continued incorporation of on-line information into
sectors of society, and the completion of the
"always connected, anywhere" transformation of
society ? A major debate over the next 10 years will be
the struggle over who owns and controls the knowledge of
where people are. "Location-aware" computing
can be a lifesaver, or a tool for delivery of new sorts
of spam and advertising.
The Internet will ? have a large impact on police
agencies, as organized crime and terrorist groups
leverage the Internet to victimize millions. By the end
of the decade, losses from Internet-related crime and
terror will exceed losses from all natural
disasters.
The Internet won't change most institutions and
human endeavors too much, because it's increasingly a
cesspool of spam, porn, phishing and other distracting
and annoying commodities, discouraging more intensive and
productive use.
The whole concept of the media, what is news, who
produces it, and why, will continue to change. This will
greatly shape politics, public opinion, and social
activism - for both the bad and the good.
There's almost no limit to the potential for change.
Publications and information-based industries have
already been radically transformed, and more traditional
industries are seeing their information-based components
moved entirely online.
Soon being offline will not be an option. As more and
more people get on the Internet, more businesses will be
there to provide services and to troll for customers.
There will be huge demand for: security, wireless access
and entertainment. Advertisers will continue to flee
print and broadcast media, fracturing that market and
forcing them into niches. When everything is available to
everyone at the same time there will be no dominant
killer-advertising channel.
The military, health and medicine, and education will
change the most, primarily because each area (a) has
strong economic/social/political pressures that will
drive change, (b) are relatively cohesive institutions
that are capable of executing on strategic change. I
expect wireless networking and de-centralization and more
participation/control from the grassroots will be at the
heart of a lot of change.
The Internet has already revolutionized the way
educational institutions work (how we conduct research,
how classes are taught, etc). The workplace has been
profoundly impacted by the net: written memos gave way to
email messages, non-colocated team members keep in touch
every day through email and instant messaging. News
institutions are a bit lost as they start to figure out
what to make of bloggers and their newfound power to
impact readers.
Several institutions and human endeavors have already
leapt ahead in using the Internet (families have been
significantly impacted in terms of generational use of
the Internet and what it enables e.g. IM; workplace
environments are impacted in terms of the Internet, but
more likely to be impacted in terms of extranets and
intranets). Other institutions are slower to adapt new
technologies that are developed as a result of the
internet - take for example the adoption of DOI by the
publishing industry, or even the ability to have an
integrated patient record in the medical field. What the
Internet enables will impact all groups - some groups are
slower to adopt technology than others. It is also
important to take into account the trends in the
intranet, extranet and other communication-based
technologies.
The most change listed is media/news. The application
that will make the most change is RSS. Previously, the
news website, even though virtual, carried significant
value to the individual seeking information. Individuals
were not apt to go to multiple sites to get diversity of
news. They will continue to not go to multiple sites, but
with RSS diversity of news will be brought to them. This
has almost the greatest potential for radical change. All
of a sudden, small publishers will have compelling means
for distribution. But the RSS readers have to get
better.
[Key things will be] anything concerning intellectual
property and information dissemination, marketing,
consumer expectations and interactions with products,
brands and entertainment - who can publish/disseminate
content - and what that content will be.
The assumption that there is ''a''
internet is fascinating. I look at the recent takeover of
the Orkut.com site by Brazilians as the most exciting
thing happening. It demonstrates how with more people
able to participate in ICTs that it will no longer be
limited to English and upper-middle-class uses and
values.
The scope and speed of the global economy as well as its
regulating mechanisms will create a data tidal wave that
will overwhelm existing comprehension mechanisms.
Entirely new technologies and societal coping mechanisms
will need to be developed to process data into
information (and who knows if wisdom will follow).
The impact of the Internet on today is not understood
and we are witnessing the birth of 4th-generation
computing. The invisible network revolution. Evolution of
the relationship of human and machine? from centralized
to decentralized to distributed to morphological
structures. Hybrid networks that evolve. Structures that
evolve. The Internet has [been] and is changing the flow
of people, capital and information, thereby introducing
structural transformations in the institutional fabric of
the world. We are talking about an evolution of
cyberspace and the relation between the virtual and the
physical and the logical. Birth of new worlds, new
languages, new processes, techniques and knowledge. The
birth of the Cybernetic Age and the death of notions of
industrial and information ages. The Info Age is part and
parcel to the Industrial Age. Industrial and Information
Ages are about knowledge accretion. Cybernetics is about
transdisciplinarity, process automation and convergence
and knowledge creation. We are on the verge of a new
renaissance. Science, art and design! Architects of the
future will understand the Internet as the platform for a
global youth boom. We no longer can see generations in
the same light and driven by segmented histories. The
global Youth Movement is networked, cross-disciplinary,
cognitively unique and it is about creating the world we
live in... The world we are projecting forward... Our
world. Their world. We are immigrants to the future.
It's all in our children's hands now.
Communications is instantaneous and mobile. Society is
and will continue to be impacted significantly due to the
reality of the technology. The circumstance as catalyst
making the impact realized may not have arrived but are
present only waiting to be fulfilled. Education is
probably the most impacted. No longer does anyone have to
attend a class to realize a benefit to an education. Cost
factors should be significantly impacted to making
education available to everyone worldwide for relatively
small costs.
The most radical impacts will be in areas such as
government and public policy as a result of information
sharing among the non-elite. Opinions will be shaped by
far more - and far less elite - influences than the
fairly limited ones in the past, such as major media and
government officials. The power of virtual lobbies will
continue to grow. However, it is an open question of
whether or not the financing for these will remain
diffused among the non-elite or be co-opted by
corporations or ideological organizations. The other key
area of impact will be healthcare, as the Internet
changes the relationship between medical professionals
and consumers.
We will continue to find new ways of connecting humans
to each other and new ways to give over to technology
things that humans do now.
Organizations and functions that require large numbers
of people to actively communicate with one another are
more Internet driven than those driven by passive
interactions. Competitive advantage among nations,
companies and peoples will be among those who can apply
future technology to their basic needs and
infrastructure.
Business will change the most as companies use the
Internet to link themselves with suppliers, distributors
and customers. Governments will be more responsive to
their constituents. Education will be increasingly freed
from the walls of the classroom. Physical presence will
not disappear; in fact, it will be more valuable than
ever, because people will not have to ''be
there'' but will do so only when they choose
to.
In the next decade, these contributing factors: faster
Internet; cheaper, faster computers; better mobile
devices; better webcams, microphones; cheaper peripherals
(printers, DVD burners, LCD screens, portable storage ?)
will get more people to access the Internet in richer
ways in a more affordable way. Also, China, India, Brazil
etc. coming online will change the overall Internet user
demographics. These ''enabling'' factors
will have revolutionary technology advances in
communications, payment infrastructure and information
dissemination that will further improve efficiencies in
various industries that have a lot of middle men, wiping
out established players in medicine, entertainment ?
Internet will improve the quality of life for a lot of
people (affording more items) but will complicate
people's lives (artificial necessities) in that
overall life-satisfaction ratings could go down.
The ability to keep in touch with non-local family
members is affirming, particularly for those with young
children and grandparents far away. On the other hand,
the focus on the Internet in the home might further
contribute to a disconnect from your
community/neighborhood/family of place.
The long-term focus should be the pervasiveness of the
change over the next decade ... I see a two-pronged
development for this change. The first is the progress of
virtual presence from today's fictitious game avatars
and 2-dimensional business teleconferences to a subtle,
nuanced and authentic representation of people and
environments. The second path is the provision of devices
and real-time connections so that the granularity of
reality is transparently overlain with a web of context
and information.
Within 10 years, many more devices will connect (and
we'll think back to how quaint it was when we needed
a ''browser''): in our cars, kitchens,
phones, etc. The Internet will continue to be driven by
people rather than be constricted by commercial
interests. The Open Source model will continue to grow in
popularity and ease of use, and we might even start
thinking in terms of Open Source models. This would
improve the efficiency and transparency of everything
from government to commerce to interpersonal
communication ? The most radical and positive change I
can envision is the change in the way people interact
with government. If public information, public comment,
voter information, planning processes, etc., were to be
overhauled so as to make them highly accessible to
citizens online, it would go very far toward improving
citizen involvement and taking the corrupted
old-fashioned media monopolies out of their middle-man
roles.
On information Internet is increasing the
noise-to-signal ratio, leaving fashion and false news a
great place. On the other hand, new methods of securing
the true from the false will emerge. The source will
become more important than the message, as it is in TV.
Relationships between individuals will be fragmented more
than they are today, implying less commitment in most
interactions. This will be balanced in the short term by
increased value for family and close-relatives relations.
Intimacy will not always mean physical proximity. The
commercial side of web will be comforted in the long
run.
The most changes will probably be in the
international/political and business spheres. The
Internet has shown itself to be really useful to people
seeking to bring information into otherwise tightly
controlled societies, or to spread information and
propaganda. Terrorists' use of the web to display
their captives comes to mind. In the business sphere, I
am seeing a slow but sure decrease in the need for
face-to-face meetings or shared workplaces; as of this
year, our organization is heavily using netmeetings to
save travel expenses or time lost in getting to other
campuses. CDC is also supporting more telecommuters, who
connect to work via the Internet. This phenomenon is only
going to get more common, and this is a HUGE change in
the way business is done.
The Internet has placed the power of information in the
hands of the masses. While gatekeepers, such as big
media, still exist and will continue to exist, the flow
of information is much more free, especially as tools,
such as imovie, have allowed people to create their own
media. Entertainment, media and commerce have been most
effected and will continue to be effected as people
search out their own truth. From a cybernetics
standpoint, we have moved from a hierarchy to a circuit -
almost as if the structure of Internet is changing the
structure of communication and society itself.
The information-anywhere-anytime future we are fast
approaching will heighten the divide between the haves
and have-nots. Information is power. Governments also
will be transformed by the instant reactionary and
amplificatory effect the Internet has. Government
adjusted to TV by polishing charisma over substance. The
next revolution is already underway, and sacrifices
substance completely to rule the infomoment.
Person-to-person communication will be the first where
various technologies (IM, voice, data, etc.) converge.
However, there will be some negotiation of this, as some
people like to be contacted immediately (cell phone, for
example) and some prefer to answer at their leisure
(email, IM). Spam and Spim will have to be eradicated or
sufficiently curbed for this point to be
reached.
The Internet will primarily remain a tool of the wealthy
(families, nations, etc), but slowly will become a mass
media. As this happens, the sharing of information and
ideas will begin to also increase.
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