[1st-mile-nm] Pew: The Future of the Internet III

[Richard Lowenberg]

>From the Pew Internet & American Life Project

The Future of the Internet III

The full report can be found on the Pew site:
www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/The-Future-of-the-Internet-III.aspx

A survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major
tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access,
voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded
in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves.

They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more
forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about
technology and its roles in the year 2020:

# The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most
people in the world in 2020.

# The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not
necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.

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

# Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection
will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to
copy and share content without payment.

# The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and
virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the
results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

# Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet
architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from
scratch.


-- 
Richard Lowenberg
1st-Mile Institute
P.O. Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110;   505-603-5200 cell
rl at 1st-mile.com  www.1st-mile.com

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