What will the internet-connected world look like in 2020? Pew knows..
February 25th, 2010 by Lloyd Gofton
As you may have seen last week, The Pew Internet & American Life Project published the findings of its fourth ‘future of the Internet survey’ carried out between December 2nd, 2009 to January 11th, 2010.
If you’re not familiar with The Pew Internet & American Life Project, it focuses on surveying ‘web users and experts’ to help predict the future of the internet. The 895 respondents, 371 of whom were considered ‘experts’, were all opt-in, self-selecting and broken down as follows; scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers, along with Internet users screened by the authors.
The respondents were asked to consider the future of the internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the likely innovations that will occur. The survey required them to assess different “tension pairs” - each pair offering two different 2020 scenarios with the same overall theme and opposite outcomes - and to select the one most likely choice of two statements, some of which are overviewed below.
The survey has its fans and its critics, and certainly shouldn’t be taken as gospel, but I think it offers an interesting insight into current thinking on future issues and theories, which are often used to fuel related ‘future of the Internet stories’ as has been the case in the last week.
So, now we’ve done the introductions and the disclaimers, what about the juicy stuff?
Well, the “Is Google Making us Stupid?” meme that famously sprouted up in 2008 via the cover of Atlantic magazine, originally attributed to technology scholar Nicholas Carr, features heavily. He argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. This line of argument was not supported by the survey as 76 percent of respondents believe that the Internet will make people cleverer in the next 10 years, while also improving reading and writing abilities. For a full run down on this question, look here.
The graphic below, which was taken from the research, shows the distribution of responses to the paired statements. The first column covers the answers of 371 long-time experts who have regularly participated in these surveys. The second column covers the answers of all the respondents, including the 524 who were recruited by other experts or by their association with the Pew Internet Project.
You can see the full report here, with responses to the following questions:
Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now?
84% of experts say most innovations come out of the blue and will not be predicted
Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years
64% of experts say yes
Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?
42 percent of the experts believe that in the next 10 years, anonymous online activities will “sharply decrease” due to the stricter Internet safety and identification system, but 55 percent of people believe it will still be easy to scan web pages anonymously.
Overall, the survey is a good guide, sure it doesn’t exactly offer a revolutionary window to the future, but it perhaps confirms a deeper change that many have previously suspected in the way the human mind and behaviour is reacting to the community approach of the web.
It could be argued that the web is returning us to our original human characteristics of community values and shared intelligence but on a much larger scale, with the bonus of this shared knowledge available 24/7, at least to those that have access.
It is this difference in terms of the way we gain and measure intelligence that should be the fundamental issue of the ‘Is Google making us stupid’ question, rather than trying to measure intelligence or learning in a traditional way, we need to consider the changed landscape and that future generations simply won’t be constrained by the memory-focused approach to intelligence that some still have.
Tags: future, Internet, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Statistics, Web
