PIP Future Internet 3: The Future of the Internet 2008

The Future of theInternet III

A survey of experts shows they expect major techadvances as the phone becomes a primary device foronline access, voice-recognition improves, and thestructure of the Internet itself improves. They disagreeabout whether this will lead to more social tolerance,more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

December 14, 2008

Janna Quitney Anderson, Elon UniversityLee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet & AmericanLife Project

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Technology stakeholders and critics were asked in an onlinesurvey to assess scenarios about the future social, political, andeconomic impact of the Internet and they said the following:

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The mobile device will be the primary connection toolto the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.

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The transparency of people and organizations willincrease, but that will not necessarily yield more personalintegrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.

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Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with theInternet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

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Those working to enforce intellectual property law andcopyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,”with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and sharecontent without payment.

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The divisions between personal time and work time andbetween physical and virtual reality will be further erased foreveryone who’s connected, and the results will be mixed interms of social relations.

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“Next-generation” engineering of the network toimprove the current Internet architecture is more likely than aneffort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

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NTERPRETING THE

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This is the third canvassing of Internet specialists and analysts bythe Pew Internet & American Life Project.

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While a wide range of

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The results of the first survey can be found at:http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf .

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opinion from experts, organizations, and interested institutions wassought, this survey should not be taken as a representativecanvassing of Internet experts. By design, this survey was an “optin,” self-selecting effort. That process does not yield a random,representative sample.Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentatorsresponded in this survey to scenarios about the effect of the Interneton social, political, and economic life in the year 2020. Anadditional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a totalof 1,196 participants who shared their views.Experts were located in two ways. First, nearly a thousand wereidentified in an extensive canvassing of scholarly, government, andbusiness documents from the period 1990-1995 to see who hadventured predictions about the future impact of the Internet. Severalhundred of them participated in the first two surveys conducted byPew Internet and Elon University, and they were recontacted forthis survey. Second, expert participants were hand-picked due totheir positions as stakeholders in the development of the Internet orthey were reached through the leadership listservs of top technologyorganizations including the Internet Society, Association forComputing Machinery, the World Wide Web Consortium, theUnited Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance,Internet2, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, InternetCorporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, InternationalTelecommunication Union, Computer Professionals for SocialResponsibility, Association of Internet Researchers, and theAmerican Sociological Association's Information TechnologyResearch section. For the first time, some respondents were invited

The results of the second survey are available at:http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet_2006.pdf A more extensive review of all the predictions and comments in that survey can befound at the website for “Imagining the Internet” athttp://www.elon.edu/predictions/default.html.