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首页2008年互联网未来展望:技术革新与社会影响
《互联网的未来III(2008)》是由皮尤互联网与美国生活项目于2008年12月发布的研究报告。该报告基于对技术专家的在线调查,探讨了未来互联网可能带来的社会、政治和经济影响。专家们预测,随着移动设备成为主要的在线接入工具,电话技术的进步以及互联网结构本身的优化,这些变化将深刻地改变人们的生活方式。
在技术层面上,专家们认为手机将成为最主要的互联网连接手段,这将推动移动互联网的发展,使得随时随地获取信息和服务变得更加便捷。同时,他们预计语音识别技术会得到显著提升,可能应用于智能家居、个人助理等领域,进一步简化用户的操作和交流方式。
然而,关于这些技术进步对人类社会的影响,专家们存在分歧。一方面,他们认为这可能导致更高的社会包容性,因为更广泛的互联网接入可能会打破地域限制,加强跨文化交流,增进理解和尊重。另一方面,技术的便利也可能带来新的隐私挑战和人际关系的复杂化,如虚拟世界的匿名性可能导致网络欺凌或人际关系的疏离。
此外,报告还探讨了技术发展可能对家庭生活产生的影响,例如,更好的移动互联网可能促进远程工作和学习,提高家庭生活质量。然而,这也可能带来工作与生活的界限模糊,家庭成员之间的面对面交流减少等问题。
《互联网的未来III》提供了深入的社会学视角,通过对专家意见的汇总,为我们描绘了一个科技不断演进、社会关系面临变革的未来景象。报告的作者是李·雷恩ie和詹娜·安德森,他们从政策制定者、企业家到学者等不同角度进行了多维度的讨论。报告最后提供了在线查看链接(<http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/The-Future-of-the-Internet-III.aspx>),以便读者进一步了解详细的内容和分析。
通过阅读这份报告,读者可以了解到当时专家对于互联网发展的预期,以及这些预期如何塑造我们现代社会的未来走向。它不仅是技术进步的预测,更是对未来社会变迁的思考与警示。
Lee Rainie
Director
Janna Anderson
The Future of the Internet III
A survey of experts shows they expect major tech
advances as the phone becomes a primary device for
online access, voice-recognition improves, and the
structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree
about whether this will lead to more social tolerance,
more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.
December 2008
CONTENTS
Summary of Findings
NOTES
1
The results of the first survey can be found at:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf. 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 be found at
the website for “Imagining the Internet”at http://www.elon.edu/predictions/default.html.
Acknowledgements
Background
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
Findings
Technology stakeholders and critics were asked in an online survey to assess
scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the
Internet and they said the following:
l
The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for
most people in the world in 2020.
l
The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will
not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or
forgiveness.
l
Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more
prevalent and accepted by 2020.
l
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.
l
The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical
and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected,
and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
l
“Next-generation”engineering of the network to improve the current
Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the
architecture from scratch.
About the Methodology and Interpreting the Findings
This is the third canvassing of Internet specialists and analysts by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project.
1
While a wide range of opinion from experts, organizations, and
interested institutions was sought, this survey should not be taken as a representative
canvassing of Internet experts. By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting
effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample.
Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this
survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life
in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total
of 1,196 participants who shared their views.
Experts were located in two ways. First, nearly a thousand were identified in an
extensive canvassing of scholarly, government, and business documents from the period
1990-1995 to see who had ventured predictions about the future impact of the Internet.
Several hundred of them participated in the first two surveys conducted by Pew Internet
and Elon University, and they were recontacted for this survey. Second, expert
participants were hand-picked due to their positions as stakeholders in the development
of the Internet or they were reached through the leadership listservs of top technology
organizations including the Internet Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the
World Wide Web Consortium, the United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet
Governance, Internet2, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, International Telecommunication
Union, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Association of Internet
Researchers, and the American Sociological Association's Information Technology
Research section. For the first time, some respondents were invited to participate
through personal messages sent using a social network, Facebook.
In all, 578 experts identified through these channels responded to the survey.
While many respondents are at the pinnacle of Internet leadership, some of the survey
respondents are “working in the trenches” of building the Web. Most of the people in this
latter segment of responders came to the survey by invitation because they are on the
email list of the Pew Internet & American Life Project or are otherwise known to the
Project. They are not necessarily opinion leaders for their industries or well-known
futurists, but it is striking how much their views were distributed in ways that paralleled
those who are celebrated in the technology field.
In all, 618 additional respondents participated in this survey from these quarters. Thus,
the expert results are reported as the product of 578 responses and the lines listing “all
responses” include these additional 618 participants.
This report presents the views of respondents in two ways. First, we cite the aggregate
views of those who responded to our survey. Second, we have quoted many of their
opinions and predictions in the body of this report, and even more of their views are
available on the Elon University-Pew Internet & American Life Project Web site:
http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org/. Scores more responses to each of the scenarios
are cited on specific web pages devoted to each scenarios. Those urls are given in the
chapters devoted to the scenarios.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: Themes Many Respondents Struck in
Their Answers
Here are some of the major themes that run through respondents’ answers:
The mobile phone will be the dominant connection tool:More than three-
quarters of the expert respondents (77%) agreed with a scenario that posited that the
mobile computing device—with more-significant computing power in 2020—will be the
primary Internet communications platform for a majority of people across the world.
They agreed that connection will generally be offered under a set of universal standards
internationally, though many registered doubts about corporations’ and regulators’
willingnesstomakeithappen.
Heightened social tolerance may not be a Web 2.0 result:Respondents were
asked if people will be more tolerant in 2020 than they are today. Some 56% of the
expert respondents disagreed with a scenario positing that social tolerance will advance
significantly by then, saying communication networks also expand the potential for
hate, bigotry, and terrorism. Some 32% predicted tolerance will grow. A number of the
survey participants indicated that the divide between the tolerant and intolerant could
possibly be deepened because of information-sharing tactics people use on the Internet.
Air-typing, touch interfaces, and talking to devices will become common: A
notable majority of the respondents (64%) favored the idea that by 2020 user interfaces
will offer advanced talk, touch, and typing options, and some added a fourth “T”—think.
Those who chose to elaborate in extended responses disagreed on which of the four will
make the most progress by 2020. There was a fairly even yes-no split on the likely
success of voice-recognition or significant wireless keyboard advances and mostly
positive support of the advance of interfaces involving touch and gestures—this was
highly influenced by the introduction of the iPhone and various multitouch surface
computing platforms in 2007 and 2008. A number of respondents projected the
possibility of a thought-based interface—neural networks offering mind-controlled
human-computer interaction. Many expressed concerns over rude, overt public displays
by people using ICTs (“yakking away on their phones about their latest foot fungus”)
and emphasized the desire for people to keep private communications private in future
digital interfaces.
IP law and copyright will remain unsettled:Three out of five respondents (60%)
disagreed with the idea that legislatures, courts, the technology industry, and media
companies will exercise effective content control by 2020. They said “cracking”
technology will stay ahead of technology to control intellectual property (IP) or policy
regulating IP. And they predicted that regulators will not be able to come to a global
agreement about intellectual property. Many respondents suggested that new economic
models will have to be implemented, with an assumption that much that was once
classified as paid content will have to be offered free or in exchange for attention or
some other unit of value. Nearly a third of the survey respondents (31%) agreed that IP
regulation will be successful by 2020; they said more content will be privatized, some
adding that this control might be exercised at the hardware level, through Internet-
access devices such as smartphones.
The division between personal and professional time will disappear:A
majority of expert respondents (56%) agreed with the statement that in 2020 “few lines
(will) divide professional from personal time, and that’s OK.” While some people are
hopeful about a hyperconnected future with more freedom, flexibility, and life
enhancements, others express fears that mobility and ubiquity of networked computing
devices will be harmful for most people by adding to stress and challenging family life
and social life.
Network engineering research will build on the status quo—there isn’t likely
to be a “next-gen ”Internet:Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) said they
think the original Internet architecture will still be in place in 2020 even as it is
continually being refined. They did not believe the current Internet will be replaced by a
completely new “next-generation”system between now and 2020. Those who wrote
extended elaborations to their answers projected the expectation that IPv6 and the
Semantic Web will be vital elements in the continuing development of the Internet over
the next decade. Among other predictions: there will be more “walled gardens,”
separated Internet spaces, created by governments and corporations to maintain
network control; governments and corporations will leverage security fears to retain
power over individuals; crime, piracy, terror, and other negatives will always be
common elements in an open system.
Transparency may or may not make the world a better place:Respondents
were split evenly on whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater
transparency of people and institutions afforded by the Internet: 45% of expert
respondents agreed that transparency of organizations and individuals will heighten
individual integrity and forgiveness and 44% disagreed. The comments about this
prediction were varied: Some argued that transparency is an unstoppable force that has
positives and negatives; it might somehow influence people to live lives in which
integrity and forgiveness are more likely. Others posited that transparency won’t have
any positive influence, in fact it makes everyone vulnerable, and bad things will happen
because of it. Still others argued that the concept of “privacy” is changing, it is becoming
scarce, and it will be protected and threatened by emerging innovations; tracking and
databasing will be ubiquitous; reputation maintenance and repair will be required; some
people will have multiple digital identities; some people will withdraw.
Augmented reality and interactive virtual spaces might see more action:More
than half of respondents (55%) agreed with the notion that many lives will be touched in
2020 by virtual worlds, mirror worlds, and augmented reality. Yet 45% either disagreed
or didn’t anwer this question, so the sentiment isn’t overwhelming. People’s definitions
for the terms “augmented reality”and “virtual reality” are quite varied; smartphones
and GPS help people augment reality to a certain extent today and are expected to do
more soon; many think today’s social networks qualify as a form of virtual reality while
others define it in terms of Second Life or something even more immersive. Some noted
that by 2020 augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will have reached the
point of blurring with reality. Many indicated this will enhance the world, providing new
opportunities for conferencing, teaching, and 3-D modeling, and some added that
breakthroughs to come may bring significant change, including fusion with other
developments, such as genetic engineering. Some respondents expressed fear of the
negatives of AR and VR, including: new extensions of the digital divide; an increase in
violence and obesity; and the potential for addiction or overload. There is agreement that
user interfaces have to be much more intuitive for AR and VR to become more
universally adopted.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: A Sample of Revealing Quotations and
Predictions Selected from the Thousands Submitted
The evolution of the device for connection:“People in Africa turned paid
telephone minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency…There are already reasons
why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use cheap
telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways to use
connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”—Howard
Rheingold, Internet sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart
Mobs”
“By 2020, the network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world…Billions of people will have joined
the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.” —Susan Crawford,
founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) board member
“Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor populations, and the next five
years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal, and federal governments,
handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will win.”—danah boyd,
Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
“Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era—like transistor radios are
today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard
communications chip on many devices. We'll probably carry some kind of screen-based
reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to
communicate verbally, we'll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.” —Josh
Quittner, executive editor of Fortune Magazine and longtime technology journalist
and editor
The evolution of social tolerance: “Not in mankind’s nature. The first global satellite
link-up was 1967, BBC's Our World: the Beatles ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and we still have
war, genocide, and assassination (Lennon's poignantly).”—Adam Peake, policy
analyst for the Center for Global Communications and participant in the World
Summit on the Information Society
“Polarization will continue and the people on the extremes will be less tolerant of those
opposite them. At the same time, within homogenous groups (religious, political, social,
financial, etc.) greater tolerance will likely occur.”—Don Heath, Internet pioneer and
former president and CEO of the Internet Society
“Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or
kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, since one's real-world
surroundings will not have the homogeneity of one's online clan.”—Jim Horning,
chief scientist for information security at SPARTA Inc. and a founder of InterTrust’s
Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory
The evolution of intellectual property law and copyright: “Many people want IP
protection, but everyone wants to steal. Regardless of the legal mechanisms so far—e.g.,
automatic damages, compulsory copyrights—many people would prefer the illegal route,
perhaps because it runs up their adrenaline.” —Michael Botein, founding director of
the Media Law Center at New York University Law School
“Copying data is the natural state of computers; we would have to try to compromise
them too much to support this regime.”—Brad Templeton, chairman of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
“While I applaud the efforts of DRM [digital rights management] opponents, I am
discouraged by the progress DRM seems to continue to make in hardware as much as in
software. Having purchased an iPhone, I was delighted when Apple updated its software
to allow custom ringtones, only to discover that I needed to pay for a ringtone via the
iTunes Music Store even though the ringtone I wanted to use was one in which I own
the copyright!”—Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers
and editor of New Media & Society
“There will be cross-linking of content provider giants and Internet service provider
giants and that they will find ways to milk every last ‘currency unit’ out of the unwitting
and defenseless consumer. Governments will be strongly influenced by the business
conglomerates and will not do much to protect consumers. (Just think of the outrageous
rates charged by cable and phone company TV providers and wireless phone providers
today—it will only get worse.)” —Steve Goldstein, ICANN board member formerly of
the US National Science Foundation
“Copyright is a dead duck in a digital world. The old regime based its power on high
distribution costs. Those costs are going to zero. Bye-bye DRM.” —Dan Lynch, founder
of CyberCash and Interop Company, now a board member of the Santa Fe Institute
“You cannot stop a tide with a spoon. Cracking technology will always be several steps
ahead of DRM and content will be redistributed on anonymous networks.”—Giulio
Prisco, chief executive of Metafuturing Second Life, formerly of CERN
The evolution of privacy and transparency: “We will enter a time of mutually
assured humiliation; we all live in glass houses. That will be positive for tolerance and
understanding, but—even more important—I believe that young people will not lose
touch with their friends as my generation did and that realization of permanence in
relationships could—or should—lead to more care in those relationships.” —Jeff Jarvis,
top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of New York
Graduate School of Journalism
“Gen Y has a new notion of privacy. The old ‘never trust anyone over 30’ will turn into
‘never trust anyone who doesn't have embarrassing stuff online.’”—Jerry Michalski,
founder and president of Sociate
“Viciousness will prevail over civility, fraternity, and tolerance as a general rule, despite
the build-up of pockets or groups ruled by these virtues. Software will be unable to stop
deeper and more hard-hitting intrusions into intimacy and privacy, and these will
continue to happen.” —Alejandro Pisanty, ICANN and Internet Society leader and
directorofcomputerservicesatUniversidadNacionalAutónomadeMéxico
“By 2020, the Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by
businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have
happily traded their privacy—consciously or unconsciously—for consumer benefits such
as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and
manipulation will have largely disappeared.”—Nicholas Carr, author of the Rough
Type blog and “The Big Switch”
“The volume and ubiquity of personal information, clicktrails, personal media, etc., will
desensitize us. A super-abundance of transparency will lose its ability to shock. Maybe
there will be software-driven real-time reputation insurance service, offering monitoring
and repair to dinged reputations. This could be as ordinary as auto insurance or
mortgage insurance is today, and as automated as the nightly backups performed by
most online businesses. I don't agree that this will make us any kinder.”—Havi
Hoffman, Yahoo Developer Network
The evolution of augmented and virtual reality: “Mirror worlds are multi-
dimensional experiences with profound implications for education, medicine, and social
interaction. ‘Real life’ as we know it is over. Soon when anyone mentions reality, the
first question we will ask is, ‘Which reality are you referring to?’ We will choose our
realities, and in each reality there will be truths germane to that reality, and so we will
choose our truth as well.”—Barry Chudakov, principal with the Chudakov Company
“We in the present don't think of ourselves as living in ‘cyberspace,’ even though people
of a decade previous would have termed it such. Of the various forms of the metaverse,
however, the majority of activity will take place in blended or augmented-reality spaces,
not in distinct virtual/alternative world spaces.”—Jamais Cascio, a co-author of the
“Metaverse Roadmap Overview,”a report on the potential futures of VR, AR, and the
geoWeb
“Augmented reality will become nearly the de facto interface standard by 2020, with 2-
D and 3-D overlays over real-world objects providing rich information, context,
entertainment, and (yes) promotions and offers. At the same time, a metaverse
(especially when presented in an augmented-reality-overlay environment) provides
compelling ways to facilitate teamwork and collaboration while reducing overall travel
budgets.” —Jason Stoddard, managing partner at Centric/Agency of Change
“The virtual world removes all barriers of human limitation; you can be anyone you
want to be instead of being bound by physical and material limitations. That allows
people to be who they naturally are, freed of any perception they may have of
themselves based on their ‘real life’—it is the power of removing the barriers of your own
perception of yourself.” —Tze-Meng Tan, Multimedia Development Corporation in
Malaysia, a director at OpenSOS
“We are in the last generation of human fighter pilots. Already, drones in Iraq are
piloted in San Diego. What will improve is the ability of the artificial spaces to control
physical reality, to expand our reach more effectively in many aspects of the physical
universe.” —Dick Davies, partner at Project Management and Control Inc. and a past
president of the Association of Information Technology Professionals
“In a reaction to the virtual world, entrepreneurs will establish ‘virt-free’ zones where
reality is not augmented. In various heavily connected areas, there will be sanctuaries
(hotels, restaurants, bars, summer camps, vehicles) which people may visit to separate
themselves from adhesion or other realities.”—C.R. Roberts, Vancouver-based
technology reporter
“For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend, certain pundits can seriously
propose that the wave of the future is chatting using electronic hand-puppets. Flight
Simulator is not an aircraft, and typing at a screen is not an augmentation of the real
world.” —Seth Finkelstein, author of the Infothought blog, writer and programmer
“A map is not the territory and a letter is not the person. We have always had multiple
facades, for most, most common, work, home and play. The extension into more
immersive ‘unreal’ worlds is going to happen.”—Hamish MacEwen, consultant at
Open ICT in New Zealand
The evolution of user interfaces: “There will be ‘subvocal’ inputs that detect ‘almost
speech’ thatyouwill,butdonotactuallyvoice.Smallsensorsonteethwillalsoletyou
tap commands. Your eyeballs will track desires, sensed by your eyeglasses. And so on.”
—David Brin, futurist and author of “The Transparent Society”
“WiFi- and WiMax-enabled badges with voice recognition will act as personal
assistants—allowing you to talk with someone by saying their name, to post a voice blog,
or access directions from the Internet for the task at hand.”—Jim Kohlenberger,
director of Voice on the Net Coalition; senior fellow at the Benton Foundation
“I could see a whole physical way of communicating with our technology tools that
could be part of our health and exercise. A day answering e-mails could be a full-on
physical workout ; )….”—Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards
“We will see the display interface device separated from the input device over the next 12
years. Display devices will be everywhere, and you will be able to use them with your
input device. The input device might be virtual, as in the case of the iPhone or a
holographic keyboard, or they might resemble the keyboards and touchpads that people
are using today.”—Ross Rader, a director with Tucows who is active in the ICANN
Registrars constituency
“While air-typing and haptic gestures are widespread and ubiquitous, the arrival of
embedded optical displays, thought-transcription, eye-movement tracking, and
predictive-behavior modeling will fundamentally alter the human-computer interaction
model.” —Sean Steele, CEO and senior security consultant for infoLock Technologies
The evolution of network architecture: “The control-oriented telco (ITU) next-
generation network will not fully evolve, the importance of openness and enabling
innovation from the edges will prevail; i.e. Internet will essentially retain the key
characteristics we enjoy today, mainly because there's more money to be made.”—
Adam Peake, executive research fellow and telecommunications policy analyst at the
Center for Global Communications
“Some parts of the Internet may fragment, as nations pursue their own technology
trajectories. The Internet is so vastly complex, incremental upgrades seem to be the only
way to get anything done…Places like China may make big leaps and bounds because
there is less legacy.” —Anthony Townsend, research director, The Institute for the
Future
“Current Internet standards bodies and core Internet protocols are ossifying to such an
extent that security and performance requirements for next-generation applications will
require a totally new base platform. If current Internet base protocols survive, it will be
as a substrata paved over by new-generation smarter ways of connecting.”—Ian
Peter, Ian Peter and Associates and the Internet Mark 2 Project
“The Web must still be a messy, fabulous, exciting, dangerous, poetic, depressing, elating
place...akin to life; which is not a bad thing.”—Luis Santos, Universidade do Minho-
Braga, Portugal
“When have we ever stopped crime? If it is a choice between having some criminals
around and having a repressive government, I will take the former; they are much
easier to deal with.” —Leonard Witt, associate professor at Kennesaw State University
in Georgia and author of the Webog PJNet.org
“The Internet is not magical; it will be utterly over-managed by commercial concerns,
hobbled with ‘security’ micromanagement, and turned into money-shaped traffic for
business, the rest 90% paid-for content download and the rest of the bandwidth used for
market feedback.”—Tom Jennings, University of California-Irvine, creator of FidoNet
and builder of Wired magazine’s first online site
The evolution of work life and home life activity: “Corporate control of workers’
time—in the guise of work/ family balance—now extends to detailed monitoring of
when people are on and off work. The company town is replaced by ‘company time-
management,’ and it is work time that drives all other time uses. This dystopia
challenges the concept of white-collar work, and unionism is increasingly an issue.”—
Steve Sawyer, associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and
Technology, Penn State University
“The result may be longer, less-efficient working hours and more stressful home life.”—
Victoria Nash, director of graduate studies and policy and research officer, the
Oxford Internet Institute
“It’s already happened, for better or worse. Get over it.”—Anonymous respondent
(Many additional thoughtful and provocative comments appear in the main report.)
This Report Builds on the Online Resource Imagining the
Internet: A History and Forecast
At the invitation of Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project,
Elon University associate professor Janna Quitney Anderson began a research initiative
in the spring semester of 2003 to search for comments and predictions about the future
impact of the Internet during the time when the World Wide Web and browsers
emerged, between 1990 and 1995. The idea was to replicate the fascinating work of
Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective
Technology Assessment. Elon students, faculty, and staff studied government
documents, technology newsletters, conference proceedings, trade newsletters, and the
business press and gathered predictions about the future of the Internet. Eventually,
more than 4,000 early '90s predictions from about 1,000 people were amassed.
The early 1990s predictions are available in a searchable database online at the site
Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast and they are also the basis for a book
by Anderson titled Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives
(2005, Rowman & Littlefield).
The fruits of that work inspired additional research into the past and future of the
Internet, and the Imagining the Internet Web site
(www.imaginingtheInternet.org/) )—now numbering about 6,200 pages—includes
results from the entire series of Future of the Internet surveys, video and audio
interviews showcasing experts' predictions about the next 10 to 50 years, a children's
section, tips for teachers, a “Voices of the People” section on which anyone can post his
or her prediction, and information about the recent history of communications
technology.
We expect the site will continue to serve as a valuable resource for researchers, policy
makers, students, and the general public for decades to come. Further, we encourage
readers of this report to enter their own predictions at the site.
The series of Future of the Internet surveys is also published in book form by Cambria
Press.
Acknowledgements
About the Pew Internet & American Life Project : The Pew Internet Project is an
initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit “fact tank”that provides information
on the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping America and the world. Pew Internet
explores the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, the work place,
schools,healthcare,andcivic/politicallife.TheProjectisnonpartisanandtakesno
position on policy issues. Support for the project is provided by The Pew Charitable
Trusts. The Project’s Web site URL is: http://www.pewinternet.org.
Princeton Survey Research Associates International: PSRAI conducted the
survey that is covered in this report. It is an independent research company specializing
insocialandpolicywork.Thefirmdesigns,conductsandanalyzessurveysworldwide.
Itsexpertisealsoincludesqualitativeresearchandcontentanalysis.Withofficesin
Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., PSRAI serves the needs of clients around
thenationandtheworld.Thefirmcanbereachedat911CommonsWay,Princeton,
N.J. 08540, by telephone at 609-924-9204, by fax at 609-924-7499, or by email at
ResearchNJ@PSRA.com
The Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University’s School of
Communications: TheImaginingtheInternetCenteratElonUniversityholdsa
mirror to humanity’s use of communications technologies, informs policy development,
exposes potential futures, and provides a historic record. It has teamed with the Pew
Internet Project to complete a number of research studies, including the building of
Imagining the Internet (a foresight and history Web site), a survey of stakeholders at
the UN-administrated Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, and an
ethnographic study of a small town, “One Neighborhood, One Week on the Internet,”
all under the direction of Janna Quitney Anderson. For contact regarding Imagining the
Internet, send e-mail to predictions@elon.edu. The university site is:
http://www.elon.edu/.
Introduction
Predictions often inspire lively discussion about the future and they can help
stakeholders prepare to make adjustments to meet the needs associated with
technological change. Those who think about the future are best poised to influence it
and cope with it.
Many futurists, scientists, and long-term thinkers today argue that the acceleration of
technological change over the past decade has greatly increased the importance of
strategic vision. Technology innovations will continue to impact us. The question is
whether this process will reflect thoughtful planning or wash over us like an unstoppable
wave. This survey is aimed at gathering a collection of opinions regarding the
possibilities we all face.
How the Surveys Originated and Have Been Conducted
This research project got its start in mid-2001, when Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew
Internet & American Life Project, approached officials at Elon University with an idea
that the Project and the University might replicate the work of Ithiel de Sola Pool in his
1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment. Pool
and his students had looked at primary official documents, technology community
publications, speeches given by government and business leaders, and marketing
literature at the turn of the 20
th
Century to examine the kind of impacts experts thought
the telephone would have on Americans’ social and economic lives.
The idea was to apply Pool’s research method to the Internet, particularly focused on the
period between 1990 and 1995 when the World Wide Web and Web browsers emerged.
In the spring semester of 2003, Janna Quitney Anderson, a professor of journalism and
communications at Elon, led a research initiative that set out to accomplish this goal.
More than 4,200 predictive statements made in the early 1990s by 1,000 people were
logged and categorized. The result is available on the site Imagining the Internet: A
History and Forecast (www.imaginingtheInternet.org/).
We reasoned that if experts and technologists had been so thoughtful in the early 1990s
about what was going to happen, they would likely be equally as insightful looking
ahead from this moment. In 2004, we asked most of those whose predictions were in
the 1990-1995 database and additional experts to assess a number of predictions about
the coming decade, and their answers were codified in an initial futures survey: “The
Future of the
Internet” (http://www.pewInternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf).
Several years later, we repeated the process with some new predictions and an expanded
base of experts. In late 2005 and the first quarter of 2006, the Pew Internet Project
issued an e-mail invitation to a select group of technology thinkers, stakeholders, and
social analysts, asking them to complete the second scenario-based quantitative and
qualitative survey, “The Future of the Internet II.”The official analysis of the results of
that survey is available here:
http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet_2006.pdf
And we report here the results of a third survey that was conducted online between
December 26, 2007 and March 3, 2008. Some 1,196 people were generous enough to
take the time to respond to this Future of the Internet III online survey.
Nearly half of the Future III respondents are Internet pioneers who were online before
1993.Roughlyonefifthoftherespondentssaytheyliveandworkinanationoutsideof
North America.
The respondents' answers represent their personal views and in no way reflect the
perspectives of their employers. Many survey participants were hand-picked due to their
positions as stakeholders in the development of the Internet or they were reached
through the leadership listservs of top technology organizations including the Internet
Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the World Wide Web Consortium, the
United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, Internet2, Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, International Telecommunication Union, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, Association of Internet Researchers, and the American Sociological
Association's Information Technology Research section.
About the Survey Participants
Many top Internet leaders, activists, and commentators participated in the survey,
including Clay Shirky, Fred Baker, David Brin, Susan Crawford, Brad Templeton,
Howard Rheingold, Jim Kohlenberger, Josh Quittner, Seth Finkelstein, danah boyd, Hal
Varian, Jeff Jarvis, Anthony Rutkowski, Michael Botein, Steve Jones, Richard Bartle,
Alejandro Pisanty, Tom Vest, Milton Mueller, Bernardo Huberman, Jonne Soininen,
Don Heath, Doug Brent, Anthony Townsend, Steve Goldstein, Adam Peake, Basil
Crozier, Craig Partridge, Sebastien Bachollet, Geert Lovink, James Jay Horning, Dan
Lynch, Fernando Barrio, Roberto Gaetano, Christian Huitema, Susan Mernit, Jamais
Cascio, Norbert Klein, Tapio Varis, Martin Boyle, Ian Peter, Todd Spraggins, Catherine
Fitzpatrick, Tom Keller, Charles Kenny, Robert Cannon, Hakikur Rahman, Larry
Lannom, David Farrar, John Levine, Cliff Figallo, Sebastien Ricciardi, Lea Shaver, Seth
Gordon, Jim McConnaughey, Neil Mcintosh, Charles Ess, Alan Levin, David W. Maher,
Jonathan Dube, Thomas Vander Wal, Adrian Schofield, Clifford Lynch, Jerry Michalski,
Paul Miller, and David Moschella, to name a few.
A sampling of the workplaces of respondents includes the Internet Society, World Bank,
Booz Allen Hamilton, AT&T Labs, VeriSign, Cisco, Google, BBN Technologies, Fing,
Yahoo Japan, France Telecom, the International Telecommunication Union, Alcatel-
Lucent, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GLOCOM, AfriNIC, Electronic Privacy
Information Center, APNIC, Universiteit Maastricht, Amnesty International, BBC, PBS,
IBM, Microsoft, Forrester Research, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet
and Society, Open Society Institute, Open the Future, Yahoo, First Semantic, CNET,
Microsoft, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, IDG, FCC, Institute for the
Future, 1&1 Internet AG, Moody’s, HP Laboratories, Amazon.com, Gannett,
Lexis/Nexis, Tucows, InternetNZ, ICANN, Oxford Internet Institute, Institute of the
Information Society—Russia, The Center on Media and Society, Online News
Association, Nokia, the Association for the Advancement of Information Technology,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Network Cultures, Nortel,
Disney, DiploFoundation, Information Technology Industry Council, J-Lab,
Information Society Project at Yale University, Santa Fe Institute, the London School of
Economics, the University of California-Berkeley, NASA, the Singapore Internet
Research Center, Princeton University, the federal government of Canada, several policy
divisions of the US government, and many dozens of others.
Participants described their primary area of Internet interest as “research
scientist”(12%); “technology developer or administrator” (11%); “entrepreneur or
business leader” (10%); “author, editor, or journalist” (9%); “futurist or
consultant” (7%); “advocate, voice of the people, or activist user”(5%); “legislator or
politician” (1%); or “pioneer or originator”(2%); however many participants chose
“other”(24%) for this survey question or did not respond (18%).
The Scenarios Were Built to Elicit Deeply Felt Opinions
The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University do not advocate policy
outcomes related to the Internet. The predictive scenarios included in the survey were
structured to provoke reaction, not because we think any of them will necessarily come
tofruition.
The scenarios for this survey and survey analysis were crafted after a study of the
responses from our previous surveys and of the predictions made in reports by the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations
Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, the Metaverse Roadmap, The
Institute for the Future, Global Business Network, and other foresight organizations and
individual foresight leaders.
The 2020 scenarios were constructed to elicit engaged responses to many-layered issues,
so it was sometimes the case that survey participants would agree with most or part of a
scenario, but not all of it. In addition to trying to pack several ideas into each scenario,
we tried to balance them with “good,”“bad,” and “neutral” outcomes. The history of
technology is full of evidence that tech adoption brings both positive and negative
results.
After each portion of the survey we invited participants to write narrative responses
providing an explanation for their answers. Not surprisingly, the most interesting
product of the survey is the ensuing collection of open-ended discussion, predictions, and
analyses written by the participants in response to our material. We have included many
of those responses in this report. A great number of additional responses are included on
the Imagining the Internet site, available at: http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org.
Since participants’ answers evolved in both tone and content as they went through the
questionnaire, the findings in this report are presented in the same order as the original
survey. The respondents were asked to “sign” each written response they were willing to
have credited to them in the Elon-Pew database and in this report. The quotations in the
report are attributed to those who agreed to have their words quoted. When a quote is
not attributed to someone, it is because that person chose not to sign his or her written
answer.
To make this report more readable and include many voices, some of the lengthier
written elaborations have been edited.
Prediction and Reactions
PREDICTION:The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most
people in the world. In 2020, while "one laptop per child" and other initiatives to
bring networked digital communications to everyone are successful on many levels, the
mobile phone—now with significant computing power—is the primary Internet
connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world, providing
information in a portable, well-connected form at a relatively low price. Telephony is
offered under a set of universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, making for reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world
to another. At this point, the "bottom" three-quarters of the world's population account
for at least 50% of all people with Internet access—up from 30% in 2005.
Expert Respondents’Reactions (N=578)
MostlyAgree77%
MostlyDisagree22%
DidNotRespond*%
All Respondents’Reactions (N=1,196)
MostlyAgree81%
MostlyDisagree19%
DidNotRespond*%
Note:Sinceresultsarebasedonanonrandomsample,amarginoferrorcannotbe
computed. The “prediction” was composed to elicit responses and is not a formal
forecast.
Respondents were presented with a brief set of information outlining the status quo of
the issue 2007 that prefaced this scenario. It read:
According to the UN/ITU World Information Society Report 2007, there has been
some progress in improving digital inclusion: In 1997 the nearly three-quarters of the
world's population who lived in low-income and lower-middle-income economies
accounted for just 5% of the world's population with Internet access
2
By 2005, they
accounted for just over 30%. A number of commercial and non-profit agencies are
combining forces to bring inexpensive laptop computers to remote regions of the world
to connect under-served populations. In addition, by the end of 2008 more than half the
world's population is expected to have access to a mobile phone.
Overview of Respondents' Reactions
A significant majority of expert respondents agreed with this predicted
future. The consensus is that mobile devices will continue to grow in
importance because people need to be connected, wherever they are. Cost-
effectiveness and access are also factors driving the use of phones as
connection devices. Many respondents believe that mobile devices of the
future will have significant computing power. The experts fear that limits set
by governments and/or corporations seeking control might impede positive
evolution and diffusion of these devices; according to respondents, this
scenario’s predicted benefit of “effortless”connectivity is dependent on
corporate and government leaders’willingness to serve the public good.
The overwhelming majority of respondents agreeing with this scenario took note of the
current boom in cell phone and smartphone use and imagined its extension. “By 2020
we should see several billion cell phones shipping per year, most of which will be
Internet-capable; this will probably dwarf the volumes of other Internet-capable
devices, such as PCs,”wrote one anonymous participant.
There are 6.6 billion people in the world, and the UN estimates that 1.2 billion have
access to and use the Internet (2007 figures). Wireless Intelligence, a market database,
reports that it took 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell, just four years for
the second billion, and two years for the third billion.
3
The firm projects there will be 4
billion cell phones in the world by the end of 2008; about 11 percent were Internet-
enabled in 2007, and it is expected that could rise to 15 percent by the end of 2008. (It is
important to remember that some people own more than one mobile phone—in 2007 it
was estimated that 700 million people owned more than one—so 3 billion phones does
not equate to 3 billion people who have and use mobile phones.)
Several survey participants noted in their written elaborations to the survey question
that connectedness serves humanity in so many ways that even people who are
struggling to make a dollar a day in the world’s least-developed nations find the
economics of mobile telephony to be manageable and sometimes even vital to their lives.
“Communication is a basic human need,”responded Howard Rheingold, Internet
sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart Mobs.”“People who are
trying to scrape by have immediate need for connection to information about local labor
and commodities markets. Public-health and disaster-relief information can be an SMS
[short-message-service—or “text”] message away. People in Africa turned paid telephone
minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency, because they had the need to transfer
small amounts of money. Billions of squatters might live in slums but still ingeniously
and often illegally deliver the construction and utilities services they need. There are
already reasons why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use
cheap telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways
to use connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”
Lutfor Rahman, of the Association for Advancement of Information Technology in
Bangladesh, said mobile communication is world-changing. “Before introducing the
mobile phone in remote areas of Bangladesh, the exchange of information was through
physically meeting,”he wrote. “That wasted much time, and sometimes it became
impossible in short time because of lack of communication facilities.”
Gbenga Sesan, a Nigerian and consultant on the use of the Internet for development
for Paradigm Initiative, has written extensively about the use of mobile
communications. “With the rise in the number of mobile phone users across the
continent, it is only wise to start planning that the future will be driven through mobile
phones—governance, businesses, networking, leisure, and more,” he commented. “The
story will be the same across the world. Regardless of technology choice (GSM, CDMA,
etc), mobile telephones will form the core of human interaction and livelihood. And
when you consider the fact that some mobile phones were competing with computers in
2007, you can only wonder if owning a PC will matter by December 31, 2019.”
It Will Be More Computer Than Phone
Many who responded with a further elaboration on this scenario said while the device
we will be using will be small and possibly resemble today’s wireless phones in its shape,
it will actually be a multitasking computer, used less for voice communication than for
other tasks. “The computing power that will be able to fit into a phone-size device in 13
years will be incredible,” wroteananonymousrespondent.
“By 2020 a device that more closely resembles today's mobile phone rather than today's
computer will certainly be the primary connection tool,”said Paul Miller, a technology
evangelist for Talis, a UK-based Web company, and blogger for ZDNet. “Whether it is at
all 'phone'-like, or even used very often for voice-only communication is more open to
question, though.”
Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member, agreed. “By 2020 we'll stop
talking about ‘phones,’ with any luck,” shewrote.“Nor will we be talking about
‘telephony.’ Those terms, I hope, will be dead. These devices will just be handsets of
which we'll be very fond. They'll have screens that are just large enough for us to feel
immersedinthevisualsprovided.Whatwillwebedoing?UsingtheInternet.
Interacting, doing work, talking, participating, uploading to the cloud. By 2020, the
network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been (with any luck) disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world, but they won't be optimized on
billing (as telephone and wireless connections are now). Billions of people will have
joined the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.”
Rich Miller, CEO for Replicate Technologies and an Internet pioneer with ARPANET,
wrote, “The ‘phone’ as such is more likely to be a personal media server/media gateway.
This same personal media server—size not much different than today's mobile phone—
permits varieties of ‘terminal’ devices, including display, voice input/output, etc. Audio
and video interfaces are more likely to be separate devices (like today's Bluetooth
headset, but with more user interface controls).”
Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate dean
at the University of Illinois-Chicago, projected, “By 2020 I don't think it will be so easy
to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop. These will blend into a general
‘mobile computing’ category of device (for which we probably don't yet have a name).”
Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of Voice on the Net Coalition, a senior fellow for
the Benton Foundation and former White House policy advisor, commented, “The
mobile ‘phone’ will largely be eclipsed and replaced by the open network device—an open
mobile computing device also capable of voice. But the assumption is correct that these
mobile devices will be more significant and ubiquitous than wired devices. In terms of
inclusion, there are already developing countries that have set up open and competitive
wireless markets to foster these innovations and reap their benefits. But other developing
countries that still have government-run telecom sectors or that haven’t enabled
wireless competition could be further left behind.”
And Jeff Jarvis, top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of
New York Graduate School of Journalism, and many other respondents said we should
not concentrate on the appliance, but the connectivity. “We will have many devices that
are constantly connected; in that sense, it's connectivity that will be mobile and the
devices will merely plug in,”Jarvis explained. “This will lead to a world that is not only
connected but also live and immediate. Witnesses will share news as they witness it. We
can get answers to any question anytime. We can stay in constant touch with the people
we know, following their lives as we follow RSS and Twitter feeds.”
Respondents Say Mobility Is Key to Sharing Information
Everywhere in the World
In 2007 the bottom three-quarters of the world’s population included about 30 percent
of the people who have Internet access. The 2020 scenario proposed to survey
respondents that this number will rise to 50 percent. Participants agreed that mobile
communications devices—most of them not yet Internet-connected—have made an
amazing impact already and will continue to bridge the digital divide and promote
digital inclusion. Geert Lovink wrote, “We now still look at the world from a 'digital
divide' perspective, but that will soon be of little use. The massive use by the 'emerging'
underclasses of the 'Global South' of mobile phones should be interpreted as a necessity
of the labour force to gain mobility in order to increase their output.”
Charles Kenny, senior economist for the World Bank, the international aid agency,
commented, “The mobile phone will be used for an increasing range of services such as
m-banking in developing countries, but it will also remain key as a tool for voice
communication. For around a quarter of the world's population still officially illiterate
(and many more functionally illiterate), voice telephony will remain the primary means
of communicating over distance.”An anonymous survey participant added, “Voice
communication is the most common method used by humans to communicate, and
devices with voice capabilities will be key.”
Jonne Soininen, Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Society leader and
manager of Internet affairs for Nokia Siemens Network, added, “In many places having
fixed infrastructure is not possible either physically or economically, thus, making
mobile systems the viable option for Internet access.”
Active Internet Society and ICANN participant Cheryl Langdon-Orr said she takes
issue with the figure of 50 percent of the world being connected, and she hopes for more.
“Mobile device connectivity to the Internet is indeed a cost-effective e-future vision for
many,”she wrote, “but in my utopia where the Internet Society states ‘The Internet is
for Everyone’ we would be looking at much more than 50 percent of people being online
by 2020.”
And Sudip Aryal, president of the Nepal Rural Information Technology Development
Society, wrote, “to meet this target of 50 percent or even more than that, each and every
country should make ICT as a national-priority issue. Just like the awareness of
HIV/AIDS and use of condoms, the national and international bodies must launch a
program to aware about the ‘importance of Internet in one's life’ to the grass root
communities.”
Michael Botein, a telecommunications law expert at New York University and
consultant to the Federal Communications Commission, said improved, affordable
mobile technology could help pave the way to a friendlier world. “It is difficult to foresee
a future short of a technological breakthrough in which mobile technology will have
enough bandwidth to provide data services, real-time video, and the like,” he wrote. “On
a positive note, however, cellular will allow the beginnings of universal service in most
parts of the world—as already in Latin America and Africa—and thus may help break
down long-held hostilities.”
Several respondents, including Neil McIntosh, director of editorial development for the
top news site guardian.co.uk, based in London, said, “a greater and more fundamental
problem, however, may be poor literacy and continued widespread poverty, which
technology by itself can't solve.”
Some Experts Express Doubts About Interoperability and Open
Networks
Some of those who chose to mostly agree with this scenario did so while expressing
reservations about parts of it. A number of them suggested that governments and/or
corporations concerned with retaining or gaining more control over use of the Internet
might limit some types of connection in certain parts of the world, and others projected
a potential lack of universal standards and protocols in a world of changing technology.
Michael Zimmer, resident fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School, wrote, “I agree almost entirely with this prediction…My only hesitation is
whether there will be universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, since US mobile providers have shown little interest in providing full
interoperability and open devices to take full advantage of new mobile services.”
Social media research expert danah boyd of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for
Internet and Society wrote, “Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor
populations, and the next five years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal,
and federal governments, handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will
win. If the carriers continue to own the market, network access through mass adoption
of the mobile will be far slower than if governments would begin blanketing their land
with WiFi (or network access on other spectrum channels) as a public-good
infrastructure project and handset makers would begin making cheap accessible
handsets for such access. The latter dynamic would introduce network access (and
telephony) to many more people, much to the chagrin of carriers.”
Ross Rader, a member of the ICANN Registrars Constituency and executive for
Tucows Inc., wrote, “This scenario may likely happen over the next few years, not the
next 12. The only real obstacle to this level of adoption and social integration lies with
the willingness of the telecommunications industry to resist the temptation to segregate
and verticalize its offerings. In other words, the communications network market must
be made much more competitive than it is today. Handsets need to be freed from
applications, and applications need to be freed from networks. Only truly open networks
will drive the sort of adoption envisaged in this scenario. We are starting to see the first
glimpses of this today with Google's Android, Verizon's open network initiative, the
power of the iPhone, but much work in all of these, and other, areas remains to be done
before the networks, applications, and handsets markets are fully competitive.”
A few respondents said they believe corporate leaders are interested in the positive
diffusion of affordable technology tools to less-developed areas of the world. Peter Kim,
a senior analyst for Forrester Research, commented, “Handset manufacturers have
already started to focus on countries with lower GDP. Continued efficiency in
production and increase in computing power, along with the natural desire of humans
to connect will help make this scenario a reality.”
Many survey participants expressed concerns about pricing. One anonymous respondent
wrote, “The success of the mobile phone as a universal-access device is contingent on
adoption of flat-rate style charges, as is normal for Internet applications, rather than
high per-minute charges which currently dominate mobile-pricing structures.”
Bandwidth, Screen Size, Poor User-Interface Are Among the
Other Potential Limits Cited
Some respondents who mostly disagreed with the scenario wrote that delivery will
continue to be more efficient through earth-based connections. “Wireless doesn't ever
provide as much bandwidth as wired connections; wireless will always be slower, thus
second-best,” wrote one anonymous respondent. “Primary ‘work’ will still be done over
wired connections, with wireless filling in the gaps and supporting mobile applications.”
Another wrote, “Will there be enough wireless infrastructure for truly complex Internet
applications on a phone?”
Another more multi-layered response in regard to limitations of the scenario came from
an anonymous survey participant: “Wireless technologies have a number of inherent
problems including but not limited to interference and capacity. The simple log trend of
traffic and data patterns precludes wireless. While some form of ubiquitous wireless
access will be available most places, fibre will be more important than ever. Phones also
have UI restrictions, any conception of phones without other peripheral interfacing
technologies such as HUDS eye movement/brain interfaces simply will not meet the
needs.”
“Unless the phone—which will really be seen as the one device that we carry around that
includes voice, text, still/video camera, GPS, AV player, computer, voice-to -digital-
information interface, Internet, television, bank account, etc.—has the capacity to
project at least a 15" display, it will be too small to use as the primary connection tool for
the majority of world-wide users,” wrote Peter Eckart, director of health information
technology for the Illinois Public Health Institute. “The majority of us will carry our
digital presence indicator with us from place to place on that device, but the bandwidth
and interface will be provided by our home or work or coffee shop, with the device there
to maintain digital identity. I do agree that the mobile device will be the primary or only
connection for poorer folks. People's wealth or income will be reflected in the size of their
display, the number of Ds (2 or 3), their connection speed, amount of digital storage,
and most importantly, their level of access to information stores.”
Adrian Schofield, a leader in the World Information Technology and Services Alliance
and manager of applied research at the Johannesburg Center for Software Engineering
in South Africa, wrote that people will use multiple devices. “There are likely to be two
distinct types of hand-held device—the mobile phone and the mobile PDA,”he
commented. “The phone will be the instrument that enables the less economically
empowered people to communicate by voice and text and to perform basic financial and
government transactions. The PDA will offer the full range of communications and
computing facilities, including TV, GPS, and video camera. Using improved solar
technology, battery life will be significantly extended and offices, hotels, and other
venues will provide free plasma screens for those who wish to access a larger image than
the one offered on the device.”
Well-known economist and technology expert Hal Varian, of Google and the
University of California-Berkeley, responded, “The big problem with the cell phone is the
UI [user interface], particularly on the data side. We are waiting for a breakthrough.”
Fabrice Florin, the executive director of NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news
network, wrote, “While I agree that the mobile phone will play a growing role as a low-
cost computing platform, I disagree that it will be the 'primary Internet connection and
the only one for a majority of the people across the world.' Other computing platforms
and connectivity options will become widely available by then, such as cheap computers
(or wall-based computing environments) with landline or comparable broadband
connections. I predict that these faster connections and larger-screen platforms will be
more affordable and effective from a productivity standpoint than small and slow
mobile platforms.”
One Laptop Per Child Is Seen as Limited
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a large-scale US-based project to provide affordable,
practical computing and Internet capabilities to people in underserved communities
around the world. The effort has brought together people from the technology industry,
non-governmental organizations, and governments in the process of designing,
manufacturing, and distributing these tools.
The Future of the Internet III survey was distributed at about the same time the OLPC
computers became available; they have come under some criticism in the popular
media, and they met some criticism from survey participants. Scott Smith wrote,
“OLPC-style efforts are already beginning to fragment at the start of 2008 even before
the actual OLPC initiative gains any real ground.”Seth Finkelstein wrote, “One
Laptop Per Child is a classic ‘ugly American’-style project.”
Charles Ess, an online culture and ethics researcher from Drury University and a
leader of the Association of Internet Researchers, commented, “The One Laptop Per
Child initiative is foundering not so much on issues of economics, but more on issues of
culture. Most of the non-Western ‘targets’ for the initiative use languages that are not
easily captured through the use of the standard Roman keyboard. More broadly, the
literacy required to manipulate most computer-based communications technologies and
venues is not to be taken for granted among all populations and demographic groups—
certainly not within the US and Western Europe, much less through other cultures in
which orality still predominates (e.g., indigenous peoples). For that, mobile phones
present a relatively straightforward interface—and talking, for most people at least, is
easy! In short, talking via a phone is far more universally realizable than presuming
everyone will be able and willing to communicate via a Roman keyboard and an
expensive computer.”
Some Say 2020 Will Offer a New Paradigm
Some survey participants said this scenario as written is shortsighted and we will have
moved into a different communications environment. “A new technology will blow all of
this away,”wrote one anonymous respondent, and another wrote, “Another ‘killer app’
will emerge before 2020 that will change everything; communication will not achieve
stability in the 21
st
century.”
View Report Online:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/The-Future-of -the-Internet-III.aspx
Pew Internet & American Life Project
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202-419-4500 | pewinternet.org
Summary of Findings 3
Acknowledgements 15
Background 16
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
20
Scenario 2: The Internet and the Evolution of
Social Tolerance
29
Scenario 3: The Evolution of IP Law and Copyright
Protection
35
Scenario 4: The Evolution of Privacy, Identity, and
Forgiveness
46
Scenario 5: The Evolution of Augmented Reality
and Virtual Reality
60
Scenario 6: The Evolution of the Internet User
Interface
72
Scenario 7: The Evolution of the Architecture of
the Internet
81
Scenario 8: The Evolving Concept of Time for
Work, Leisure
91
Pew Internet & American Life Project
The Future of the Internet III | 16
Lee Rainie
Director
Janna Anderson
The Future of the Internet III
A survey of experts shows they expect major tech
advances as the phone becomes a primary device for
online access, voice-recognition improves, and the
structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree
about whether this will lead to more social tolerance,
more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.
December 2008
CONTENTS
Summary of Findings
NOTES
1
The results of the first survey can be found at:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf. 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 be found at
the website for “Imagining the Internet”at http://www.elon.edu/predictions/default.html.
Acknowledgements
Background
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
Findings
Technology stakeholders and critics were asked in an online survey to assess
scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the
Internet and they said the following:
l
The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for
most people in the world in 2020.
l
The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will
not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or
forgiveness.
l
Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more
prevalent and accepted by 2020.
l
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.
l
The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical
and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected,
and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
l
“Next-generation”engineering of the network to improve the current
Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the
architecture from scratch.
About the Methodology and Interpreting the Findings
This is the third canvassing of Internet specialists and analysts by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project.
1
While a wide range of opinion from experts, organizations, and
interested institutions was sought, this survey should not be taken as a representative
canvassing of Internet experts. By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting
effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample.
Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this
survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life
in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total
of 1,196 participants who shared their views.
Experts were located in two ways. First, nearly a thousand were identified in an
extensive canvassing of scholarly, government, and business documents from the period
1990-1995 to see who had ventured predictions about the future impact of the Internet.
Several hundred of them participated in the first two surveys conducted by Pew Internet
and Elon University, and they were recontacted for this survey. Second, expert
participants were hand-picked due to their positions as stakeholders in the development
of the Internet or they were reached through the leadership listservs of top technology
organizations including the Internet Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the
World Wide Web Consortium, the United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet
Governance, Internet2, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, International Telecommunication
Union, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Association of Internet
Researchers, and the American Sociological Association's Information Technology
Research section. For the first time, some respondents were invited to participate
through personal messages sent using a social network, Facebook.
In all, 578 experts identified through these channels responded to the survey.
While many respondents are at the pinnacle of Internet leadership, some of the survey
respondents are “working in the trenches” of building the Web. Most of the people in this
latter segment of responders came to the survey by invitation because they are on the
email list of the Pew Internet & American Life Project or are otherwise known to the
Project. They are not necessarily opinion leaders for their industries or well-known
futurists, but it is striking how much their views were distributed in ways that paralleled
those who are celebrated in the technology field.
In all, 618 additional respondents participated in this survey from these quarters. Thus,
the expert results are reported as the product of 578 responses and the lines listing “all
responses” include these additional 618 participants.
This report presents the views of respondents in two ways. First, we cite the aggregate
views of those who responded to our survey. Second, we have quoted many of their
opinions and predictions in the body of this report, and even more of their views are
available on the Elon University-Pew Internet & American Life Project Web site:
http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org/. Scores more responses to each of the scenarios
are cited on specific web pages devoted to each scenarios. Those urls are given in the
chapters devoted to the scenarios.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: Themes Many Respondents Struck in
Their Answers
Here are some of the major themes that run through respondents’ answers:
The mobile phone will be the dominant connection tool:More than three-
quarters of the expert respondents (77%) agreed with a scenario that posited that the
mobile computing device—with more-significant computing power in 2020—will be the
primary Internet communications platform for a majority of people across the world.
They agreed that connection will generally be offered under a set of universal standards
internationally, though many registered doubts about corporations’ and regulators’
willingnesstomakeithappen.
Heightened social tolerance may not be a Web 2.0 result:Respondents were
asked if people will be more tolerant in 2020 than they are today. Some 56% of the
expert respondents disagreed with a scenario positing that social tolerance will advance
significantly by then, saying communication networks also expand the potential for
hate, bigotry, and terrorism. Some 32% predicted tolerance will grow. A number of the
survey participants indicated that the divide between the tolerant and intolerant could
possibly be deepened because of information-sharing tactics people use on the Internet.
Air-typing, touch interfaces, and talking to devices will become common: A
notable majority of the respondents (64%) favored the idea that by 2020 user interfaces
will offer advanced talk, touch, and typing options, and some added a fourth “T”—think.
Those who chose to elaborate in extended responses disagreed on which of the four will
make the most progress by 2020. There was a fairly even yes-no split on the likely
success of voice-recognition or significant wireless keyboard advances and mostly
positive support of the advance of interfaces involving touch and gestures—this was
highly influenced by the introduction of the iPhone and various multitouch surface
computing platforms in 2007 and 2008. A number of respondents projected the
possibility of a thought-based interface—neural networks offering mind-controlled
human-computer interaction. Many expressed concerns over rude, overt public displays
by people using ICTs (“yakking away on their phones about their latest foot fungus”)
and emphasized the desire for people to keep private communications private in future
digital interfaces.
IP law and copyright will remain unsettled:Three out of five respondents (60%)
disagreed with the idea that legislatures, courts, the technology industry, and media
companies will exercise effective content control by 2020. They said “cracking”
technology will stay ahead of technology to control intellectual property (IP) or policy
regulating IP. And they predicted that regulators will not be able to come to a global
agreement about intellectual property. Many respondents suggested that new economic
models will have to be implemented, with an assumption that much that was once
classified as paid content will have to be offered free or in exchange for attention or
some other unit of value. Nearly a third of the survey respondents (31%) agreed that IP
regulation will be successful by 2020; they said more content will be privatized, some
adding that this control might be exercised at the hardware level, through Internet-
access devices such as smartphones.
The division between personal and professional time will disappear:A
majority of expert respondents (56%) agreed with the statement that in 2020 “few lines
(will) divide professional from personal time, and that’s OK.” While some people are
hopeful about a hyperconnected future with more freedom, flexibility, and life
enhancements, others express fears that mobility and ubiquity of networked computing
devices will be harmful for most people by adding to stress and challenging family life
and social life.
Network engineering research will build on the status quo—there isn’t likely
to be a “next-gen ”Internet:Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) said they
think the original Internet architecture will still be in place in 2020 even as it is
continually being refined. They did not believe the current Internet will be replaced by a
completely new “next-generation”system between now and 2020. Those who wrote
extended elaborations to their answers projected the expectation that IPv6 and the
Semantic Web will be vital elements in the continuing development of the Internet over
the next decade. Among other predictions: there will be more “walled gardens,”
separated Internet spaces, created by governments and corporations to maintain
network control; governments and corporations will leverage security fears to retain
power over individuals; crime, piracy, terror, and other negatives will always be
common elements in an open system.
Transparency may or may not make the world a better place:Respondents
were split evenly on whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater
transparency of people and institutions afforded by the Internet: 45% of expert
respondents agreed that transparency of organizations and individuals will heighten
individual integrity and forgiveness and 44% disagreed. The comments about this
prediction were varied: Some argued that transparency is an unstoppable force that has
positives and negatives; it might somehow influence people to live lives in which
integrity and forgiveness are more likely. Others posited that transparency won’t have
any positive influence, in fact it makes everyone vulnerable, and bad things will happen
because of it. Still others argued that the concept of “privacy” is changing, it is becoming
scarce, and it will be protected and threatened by emerging innovations; tracking and
databasing will be ubiquitous; reputation maintenance and repair will be required; some
people will have multiple digital identities; some people will withdraw.
Augmented reality and interactive virtual spaces might see more action:More
than half of respondents (55%) agreed with the notion that many lives will be touched in
2020 by virtual worlds, mirror worlds, and augmented reality. Yet 45% either disagreed
or didn’t anwer this question, so the sentiment isn’t overwhelming. People’s definitions
for the terms “augmented reality”and “virtual reality” are quite varied; smartphones
and GPS help people augment reality to a certain extent today and are expected to do
more soon; many think today’s social networks qualify as a form of virtual reality while
others define it in terms of Second Life or something even more immersive. Some noted
that by 2020 augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will have reached the
point of blurring with reality. Many indicated this will enhance the world, providing new
opportunities for conferencing, teaching, and 3-D modeling, and some added that
breakthroughs to come may bring significant change, including fusion with other
developments, such as genetic engineering. Some respondents expressed fear of the
negatives of AR and VR, including: new extensions of the digital divide; an increase in
violence and obesity; and the potential for addiction or overload. There is agreement that
user interfaces have to be much more intuitive for AR and VR to become more
universally adopted.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: A Sample of Revealing Quotations and
Predictions Selected from the Thousands Submitted
The evolution of the device for connection:“People in Africa turned paid
telephone minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency…There are already reasons
why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use cheap
telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways to use
connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”—Howard
Rheingold, Internet sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart
Mobs”
“By 2020, the network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world…Billions of people will have joined
the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.” —Susan Crawford,
founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) board member
“Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor populations, and the next five
years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal, and federal governments,
handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will win.”—danah boyd,
Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
“Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era—like transistor radios are
today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard
communications chip on many devices. We'll probably carry some kind of screen-based
reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to
communicate verbally, we'll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.” —Josh
Quittner, executive editor of Fortune Magazine and longtime technology journalist
and editor
The evolution of social tolerance: “Not in mankind’s nature. The first global satellite
link-up was 1967, BBC's Our World: the Beatles ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and we still have
war, genocide, and assassination (Lennon's poignantly).”—Adam Peake, policy
analyst for the Center for Global Communications and participant in the World
Summit on the Information Society
“Polarization will continue and the people on the extremes will be less tolerant of those
opposite them. At the same time, within homogenous groups (religious, political, social,
financial, etc.) greater tolerance will likely occur.”—Don Heath, Internet pioneer and
former president and CEO of the Internet Society
“Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or
kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, since one's real-world
surroundings will not have the homogeneity of one's online clan.”—Jim Horning,
chief scientist for information security at SPARTA Inc. and a founder of InterTrust’s
Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory
The evolution of intellectual property law and copyright: “Many people want IP
protection, but everyone wants to steal. Regardless of the legal mechanisms so far—e.g.,
automatic damages, compulsory copyrights—many people would prefer the illegal route,
perhaps because it runs up their adrenaline.” —Michael Botein, founding director of
the Media Law Center at New York University Law School
“Copying data is the natural state of computers; we would have to try to compromise
them too much to support this regime.”—Brad Templeton, chairman of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
“While I applaud the efforts of DRM [digital rights management] opponents, I am
discouraged by the progress DRM seems to continue to make in hardware as much as in
software. Having purchased an iPhone, I was delighted when Apple updated its software
to allow custom ringtones, only to discover that I needed to pay for a ringtone via the
iTunes Music Store even though the ringtone I wanted to use was one in which I own
the copyright!”—Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers
and editor of New Media & Society
“There will be cross-linking of content provider giants and Internet service provider
giants and that they will find ways to milk every last ‘currency unit’ out of the unwitting
and defenseless consumer. Governments will be strongly influenced by the business
conglomerates and will not do much to protect consumers. (Just think of the outrageous
rates charged by cable and phone company TV providers and wireless phone providers
today—it will only get worse.)” —Steve Goldstein, ICANN board member formerly of
the US National Science Foundation
“Copyright is a dead duck in a digital world. The old regime based its power on high
distribution costs. Those costs are going to zero. Bye-bye DRM.” —Dan Lynch, founder
of CyberCash and Interop Company, now a board member of the Santa Fe Institute
“You cannot stop a tide with a spoon. Cracking technology will always be several steps
ahead of DRM and content will be redistributed on anonymous networks.”—Giulio
Prisco, chief executive of Metafuturing Second Life, formerly of CERN
The evolution of privacy and transparency: “We will enter a time of mutually
assured humiliation; we all live in glass houses. That will be positive for tolerance and
understanding, but—even more important—I believe that young people will not lose
touch with their friends as my generation did and that realization of permanence in
relationships could—or should—lead to more care in those relationships.” —Jeff Jarvis,
top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of New York
Graduate School of Journalism
“Gen Y has a new notion of privacy. The old ‘never trust anyone over 30’ will turn into
‘never trust anyone who doesn't have embarrassing stuff online.’”—Jerry Michalski,
founder and president of Sociate
“Viciousness will prevail over civility, fraternity, and tolerance as a general rule, despite
the build-up of pockets or groups ruled by these virtues. Software will be unable to stop
deeper and more hard-hitting intrusions into intimacy and privacy, and these will
continue to happen.” —Alejandro Pisanty, ICANN and Internet Society leader and
directorofcomputerservicesatUniversidadNacionalAutónomadeMéxico
“By 2020, the Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by
businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have
happily traded their privacy—consciously or unconsciously—for consumer benefits such
as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and
manipulation will have largely disappeared.”—Nicholas Carr, author of the Rough
Type blog and “The Big Switch”
“The volume and ubiquity of personal information, clicktrails, personal media, etc., will
desensitize us. A super-abundance of transparency will lose its ability to shock. Maybe
there will be software-driven real-time reputation insurance service, offering monitoring
and repair to dinged reputations. This could be as ordinary as auto insurance or
mortgage insurance is today, and as automated as the nightly backups performed by
most online businesses. I don't agree that this will make us any kinder.”—Havi
Hoffman, Yahoo Developer Network
The evolution of augmented and virtual reality: “Mirror worlds are multi-
dimensional experiences with profound implications for education, medicine, and social
interaction. ‘Real life’ as we know it is over. Soon when anyone mentions reality, the
first question we will ask is, ‘Which reality are you referring to?’ We will choose our
realities, and in each reality there will be truths germane to that reality, and so we will
choose our truth as well.”—Barry Chudakov, principal with the Chudakov Company
“We in the present don't think of ourselves as living in ‘cyberspace,’ even though people
of a decade previous would have termed it such. Of the various forms of the metaverse,
however, the majority of activity will take place in blended or augmented-reality spaces,
not in distinct virtual/alternative world spaces.”—Jamais Cascio, a co-author of the
“Metaverse Roadmap Overview,”a report on the potential futures of VR, AR, and the
geoWeb
“Augmented reality will become nearly the de facto interface standard by 2020, with 2-
D and 3-D overlays over real-world objects providing rich information, context,
entertainment, and (yes) promotions and offers. At the same time, a metaverse
(especially when presented in an augmented-reality-overlay environment) provides
compelling ways to facilitate teamwork and collaboration while reducing overall travel
budgets.” —Jason Stoddard, managing partner at Centric/Agency of Change
“The virtual world removes all barriers of human limitation; you can be anyone you
want to be instead of being bound by physical and material limitations. That allows
people to be who they naturally are, freed of any perception they may have of
themselves based on their ‘real life’—it is the power of removing the barriers of your own
perception of yourself.” —Tze-Meng Tan, Multimedia Development Corporation in
Malaysia, a director at OpenSOS
“We are in the last generation of human fighter pilots. Already, drones in Iraq are
piloted in San Diego. What will improve is the ability of the artificial spaces to control
physical reality, to expand our reach more effectively in many aspects of the physical
universe.” —Dick Davies, partner at Project Management and Control Inc. and a past
president of the Association of Information Technology Professionals
“In a reaction to the virtual world, entrepreneurs will establish ‘virt-free’ zones where
reality is not augmented. In various heavily connected areas, there will be sanctuaries
(hotels, restaurants, bars, summer camps, vehicles) which people may visit to separate
themselves from adhesion or other realities.”—C.R. Roberts, Vancouver-based
technology reporter
“For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend, certain pundits can seriously
propose that the wave of the future is chatting using electronic hand-puppets. Flight
Simulator is not an aircraft, and typing at a screen is not an augmentation of the real
world.” —Seth Finkelstein, author of the Infothought blog, writer and programmer
“A map is not the territory and a letter is not the person. We have always had multiple
facades, for most, most common, work, home and play. The extension into more
immersive ‘unreal’ worlds is going to happen.”—Hamish MacEwen, consultant at
Open ICT in New Zealand
The evolution of user interfaces: “There will be ‘subvocal’ inputs that detect ‘almost
speech’ thatyouwill,butdonotactuallyvoice.Smallsensorsonteethwillalsoletyou
tap commands. Your eyeballs will track desires, sensed by your eyeglasses. And so on.”
—David Brin, futurist and author of “The Transparent Society”
“WiFi- and WiMax-enabled badges with voice recognition will act as personal
assistants—allowing you to talk with someone by saying their name, to post a voice blog,
or access directions from the Internet for the task at hand.”—Jim Kohlenberger,
director of Voice on the Net Coalition; senior fellow at the Benton Foundation
“I could see a whole physical way of communicating with our technology tools that
could be part of our health and exercise. A day answering e-mails could be a full-on
physical workout ; )….”—Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards
“We will see the display interface device separated from the input device over the next 12
years. Display devices will be everywhere, and you will be able to use them with your
input device. The input device might be virtual, as in the case of the iPhone or a
holographic keyboard, or they might resemble the keyboards and touchpads that people
are using today.”—Ross Rader, a director with Tucows who is active in the ICANN
Registrars constituency
“While air-typing and haptic gestures are widespread and ubiquitous, the arrival of
embedded optical displays, thought-transcription, eye-movement tracking, and
predictive-behavior modeling will fundamentally alter the human-computer interaction
model.” —Sean Steele, CEO and senior security consultant for infoLock Technologies
The evolution of network architecture: “The control-oriented telco (ITU) next-
generation network will not fully evolve, the importance of openness and enabling
innovation from the edges will prevail; i.e. Internet will essentially retain the key
characteristics we enjoy today, mainly because there's more money to be made.”—
Adam Peake, executive research fellow and telecommunications policy analyst at the
Center for Global Communications
“Some parts of the Internet may fragment, as nations pursue their own technology
trajectories. The Internet is so vastly complex, incremental upgrades seem to be the only
way to get anything done…Places like China may make big leaps and bounds because
there is less legacy.” —Anthony Townsend, research director, The Institute for the
Future
“Current Internet standards bodies and core Internet protocols are ossifying to such an
extent that security and performance requirements for next-generation applications will
require a totally new base platform. If current Internet base protocols survive, it will be
as a substrata paved over by new-generation smarter ways of connecting.”—Ian
Peter, Ian Peter and Associates and the Internet Mark 2 Project
“The Web must still be a messy, fabulous, exciting, dangerous, poetic, depressing, elating
place...akin to life; which is not a bad thing.”—Luis Santos, Universidade do Minho-
Braga, Portugal
“When have we ever stopped crime? If it is a choice between having some criminals
around and having a repressive government, I will take the former; they are much
easier to deal with.” —Leonard Witt, associate professor at Kennesaw State University
in Georgia and author of the Webog PJNet.org
“The Internet is not magical; it will be utterly over-managed by commercial concerns,
hobbled with ‘security’ micromanagement, and turned into money-shaped traffic for
business, the rest 90% paid-for content download and the rest of the bandwidth used for
market feedback.”—Tom Jennings, University of California-Irvine, creator of FidoNet
and builder of Wired magazine’s first online site
The evolution of work life and home life activity: “Corporate control of workers’
time—in the guise of work/ family balance—now extends to detailed monitoring of
when people are on and off work. The company town is replaced by ‘company time-
management,’ and it is work time that drives all other time uses. This dystopia
challenges the concept of white-collar work, and unionism is increasingly an issue.”—
Steve Sawyer, associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and
Technology, Penn State University
“The result may be longer, less-efficient working hours and more stressful home life.”—
Victoria Nash, director of graduate studies and policy and research officer, the
Oxford Internet Institute
“It’s already happened, for better or worse. Get over it.”—Anonymous respondent
(Many additional thoughtful and provocative comments appear in the main report.)
This Report Builds on the Online Resource Imagining the
Internet: A History and Forecast
At the invitation of Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project,
Elon University associate professor Janna Quitney Anderson began a research initiative
in the spring semester of 2003 to search for comments and predictions about the future
impact of the Internet during the time when the World Wide Web and browsers
emerged, between 1990 and 1995. The idea was to replicate the fascinating work of
Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective
Technology Assessment. Elon students, faculty, and staff studied government
documents, technology newsletters, conference proceedings, trade newsletters, and the
business press and gathered predictions about the future of the Internet. Eventually,
more than 4,000 early '90s predictions from about 1,000 people were amassed.
The early 1990s predictions are available in a searchable database online at the site
Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast and they are also the basis for a book
by Anderson titled Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives
(2005, Rowman & Littlefield).
The fruits of that work inspired additional research into the past and future of the
Internet, and the Imagining the Internet Web site
(www.imaginingtheInternet.org/) )—now numbering about 6,200 pages—includes
results from the entire series of Future of the Internet surveys, video and audio
interviews showcasing experts' predictions about the next 10 to 50 years, a children's
section, tips for teachers, a “Voices of the People” section on which anyone can post his
or her prediction, and information about the recent history of communications
technology.
We expect the site will continue to serve as a valuable resource for researchers, policy
makers, students, and the general public for decades to come. Further, we encourage
readers of this report to enter their own predictions at the site.
The series of Future of the Internet surveys is also published in book form by Cambria
Press.
Acknowledgements
About the Pew Internet & American Life Project : The Pew Internet Project is an
initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit “fact tank”that provides information
on the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping America and the world. Pew Internet
explores the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, the work place,
schools,healthcare,andcivic/politicallife.TheProjectisnonpartisanandtakesno
position on policy issues. Support for the project is provided by The Pew Charitable
Trusts. The Project’s Web site URL is: http://www.pewinternet.org.
Princeton Survey Research Associates International: PSRAI conducted the
survey that is covered in this report. It is an independent research company specializing
insocialandpolicywork.Thefirmdesigns,conductsandanalyzessurveysworldwide.
Itsexpertisealsoincludesqualitativeresearchandcontentanalysis.Withofficesin
Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., PSRAI serves the needs of clients around
thenationandtheworld.Thefirmcanbereachedat911CommonsWay,Princeton,
N.J. 08540, by telephone at 609-924-9204, by fax at 609-924-7499, or by email at
ResearchNJ@PSRA.com
The Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University’s School of
Communications: TheImaginingtheInternetCenteratElonUniversityholdsa
mirror to humanity’s use of communications technologies, informs policy development,
exposes potential futures, and provides a historic record. It has teamed with the Pew
Internet Project to complete a number of research studies, including the building of
Imagining the Internet (a foresight and history Web site), a survey of stakeholders at
the UN-administrated Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, and an
ethnographic study of a small town, “One Neighborhood, One Week on the Internet,”
all under the direction of Janna Quitney Anderson. For contact regarding Imagining the
Internet, send e-mail to predictions@elon.edu. The university site is:
http://www.elon.edu/.
Introduction
Predictions often inspire lively discussion about the future and they can help
stakeholders prepare to make adjustments to meet the needs associated with
technological change. Those who think about the future are best poised to influence it
and cope with it.
Many futurists, scientists, and long-term thinkers today argue that the acceleration of
technological change over the past decade has greatly increased the importance of
strategic vision. Technology innovations will continue to impact us. The question is
whether this process will reflect thoughtful planning or wash over us like an unstoppable
wave. This survey is aimed at gathering a collection of opinions regarding the
possibilities we all face.
How the Surveys Originated and Have Been Conducted
This research project got its start in mid-2001, when Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew
Internet & American Life Project, approached officials at Elon University with an idea
that the Project and the University might replicate the work of Ithiel de Sola Pool in his
1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment. Pool
and his students had looked at primary official documents, technology community
publications, speeches given by government and business leaders, and marketing
literature at the turn of the 20
th
Century to examine the kind of impacts experts thought
the telephone would have on Americans’ social and economic lives.
The idea was to apply Pool’s research method to the Internet, particularly focused on the
period between 1990 and 1995 when the World Wide Web and Web browsers emerged.
In the spring semester of 2003, Janna Quitney Anderson, a professor of journalism and
communications at Elon, led a research initiative that set out to accomplish this goal.
More than 4,200 predictive statements made in the early 1990s by 1,000 people were
logged and categorized. The result is available on the site Imagining the Internet: A
History and Forecast (www.imaginingtheInternet.org/).
We reasoned that if experts and technologists had been so thoughtful in the early 1990s
about what was going to happen, they would likely be equally as insightful looking
ahead from this moment. In 2004, we asked most of those whose predictions were in
the 1990-1995 database and additional experts to assess a number of predictions about
the coming decade, and their answers were codified in an initial futures survey: “The
Future of the
Internet” (http://www.pewInternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf).
Several years later, we repeated the process with some new predictions and an expanded
base of experts. In late 2005 and the first quarter of 2006, the Pew Internet Project
issued an e-mail invitation to a select group of technology thinkers, stakeholders, and
social analysts, asking them to complete the second scenario-based quantitative and
qualitative survey, “The Future of the Internet II.”The official analysis of the results of
that survey is available here:
http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet_2006.pdf
And we report here the results of a third survey that was conducted online between
December 26, 2007 and March 3, 2008. Some 1,196 people were generous enough to
take the time to respond to this Future of the Internet III online survey.
Nearly half of the Future III respondents are Internet pioneers who were online before
1993.Roughlyonefifthoftherespondentssaytheyliveandworkinanationoutsideof
North America.
The respondents' answers represent their personal views and in no way reflect the
perspectives of their employers. Many survey participants were hand-picked due to their
positions as stakeholders in the development of the Internet or they were reached
through the leadership listservs of top technology organizations including the Internet
Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the World Wide Web Consortium, the
United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, Internet2, Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, International Telecommunication Union, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, Association of Internet Researchers, and the American Sociological
Association's Information Technology Research section.
About the Survey Participants
Many top Internet leaders, activists, and commentators participated in the survey,
including Clay Shirky, Fred Baker, David Brin, Susan Crawford, Brad Templeton,
Howard Rheingold, Jim Kohlenberger, Josh Quittner, Seth Finkelstein, danah boyd, Hal
Varian, Jeff Jarvis, Anthony Rutkowski, Michael Botein, Steve Jones, Richard Bartle,
Alejandro Pisanty, Tom Vest, Milton Mueller, Bernardo Huberman, Jonne Soininen,
Don Heath, Doug Brent, Anthony Townsend, Steve Goldstein, Adam Peake, Basil
Crozier, Craig Partridge, Sebastien Bachollet, Geert Lovink, James Jay Horning, Dan
Lynch, Fernando Barrio, Roberto Gaetano, Christian Huitema, Susan Mernit, Jamais
Cascio, Norbert Klein, Tapio Varis, Martin Boyle, Ian Peter, Todd Spraggins, Catherine
Fitzpatrick, Tom Keller, Charles Kenny, Robert Cannon, Hakikur Rahman, Larry
Lannom, David Farrar, John Levine, Cliff Figallo, Sebastien Ricciardi, Lea Shaver, Seth
Gordon, Jim McConnaughey, Neil Mcintosh, Charles Ess, Alan Levin, David W. Maher,
Jonathan Dube, Thomas Vander Wal, Adrian Schofield, Clifford Lynch, Jerry Michalski,
Paul Miller, and David Moschella, to name a few.
A sampling of the workplaces of respondents includes the Internet Society, World Bank,
Booz Allen Hamilton, AT&T Labs, VeriSign, Cisco, Google, BBN Technologies, Fing,
Yahoo Japan, France Telecom, the International Telecommunication Union, Alcatel-
Lucent, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GLOCOM, AfriNIC, Electronic Privacy
Information Center, APNIC, Universiteit Maastricht, Amnesty International, BBC, PBS,
IBM, Microsoft, Forrester Research, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet
and Society, Open Society Institute, Open the Future, Yahoo, First Semantic, CNET,
Microsoft, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, IDG, FCC, Institute for the
Future, 1&1 Internet AG, Moody’s, HP Laboratories, Amazon.com, Gannett,
Lexis/Nexis, Tucows, InternetNZ, ICANN, Oxford Internet Institute, Institute of the
Information Society—Russia, The Center on Media and Society, Online News
Association, Nokia, the Association for the Advancement of Information Technology,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Network Cultures, Nortel,
Disney, DiploFoundation, Information Technology Industry Council, J-Lab,
Information Society Project at Yale University, Santa Fe Institute, the London School of
Economics, the University of California-Berkeley, NASA, the Singapore Internet
Research Center, Princeton University, the federal government of Canada, several policy
divisions of the US government, and many dozens of others.
Participants described their primary area of Internet interest as “research
scientist”(12%); “technology developer or administrator” (11%); “entrepreneur or
business leader” (10%); “author, editor, or journalist” (9%); “futurist or
consultant” (7%); “advocate, voice of the people, or activist user”(5%); “legislator or
politician” (1%); or “pioneer or originator”(2%); however many participants chose
“other”(24%) for this survey question or did not respond (18%).
The Scenarios Were Built to Elicit Deeply Felt Opinions
The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University do not advocate policy
outcomes related to the Internet. The predictive scenarios included in the survey were
structured to provoke reaction, not because we think any of them will necessarily come
tofruition.
The scenarios for this survey and survey analysis were crafted after a study of the
responses from our previous surveys and of the predictions made in reports by the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations
Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, the Metaverse Roadmap, The
Institute for the Future, Global Business Network, and other foresight organizations and
individual foresight leaders.
The 2020 scenarios were constructed to elicit engaged responses to many-layered issues,
so it was sometimes the case that survey participants would agree with most or part of a
scenario, but not all of it. In addition to trying to pack several ideas into each scenario,
we tried to balance them with “good,”“bad,” and “neutral” outcomes. The history of
technology is full of evidence that tech adoption brings both positive and negative
results.
After each portion of the survey we invited participants to write narrative responses
providing an explanation for their answers. Not surprisingly, the most interesting
product of the survey is the ensuing collection of open-ended discussion, predictions, and
analyses written by the participants in response to our material. We have included many
of those responses in this report. A great number of additional responses are included on
the Imagining the Internet site, available at: http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org.
Since participants’ answers evolved in both tone and content as they went through the
questionnaire, the findings in this report are presented in the same order as the original
survey. The respondents were asked to “sign” each written response they were willing to
have credited to them in the Elon-Pew database and in this report. The quotations in the
report are attributed to those who agreed to have their words quoted. When a quote is
not attributed to someone, it is because that person chose not to sign his or her written
answer.
To make this report more readable and include many voices, some of the lengthier
written elaborations have been edited.
Prediction and Reactions
PREDICTION:The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most
people in the world. In 2020, while "one laptop per child" and other initiatives to
bring networked digital communications to everyone are successful on many levels, the
mobile phone—now with significant computing power—is the primary Internet
connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world, providing
information in a portable, well-connected form at a relatively low price. Telephony is
offered under a set of universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, making for reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world
to another. At this point, the "bottom" three-quarters of the world's population account
for at least 50% of all people with Internet access—up from 30% in 2005.
Expert Respondents’Reactions (N=578)
MostlyAgree77%
MostlyDisagree22%
DidNotRespond*%
All Respondents’Reactions (N=1,196)
MostlyAgree81%
MostlyDisagree19%
DidNotRespond*%
Note:Sinceresultsarebasedonanonrandomsample,amarginoferrorcannotbe
computed. The “prediction” was composed to elicit responses and is not a formal
forecast.
Respondents were presented with a brief set of information outlining the status quo of
the issue 2007 that prefaced this scenario. It read:
According to the UN/ITU World Information Society Report 2007, there has been
some progress in improving digital inclusion: In 1997 the nearly three-quarters of the
world's population who lived in low-income and lower-middle-income economies
accounted for just 5% of the world's population with Internet access
2
By 2005, they
accounted for just over 30%. A number of commercial and non-profit agencies are
combining forces to bring inexpensive laptop computers to remote regions of the world
to connect under-served populations. In addition, by the end of 2008 more than half the
world's population is expected to have access to a mobile phone.
Overview of Respondents' Reactions
A significant majority of expert respondents agreed with this predicted
future. The consensus is that mobile devices will continue to grow in
importance because people need to be connected, wherever they are. Cost-
effectiveness and access are also factors driving the use of phones as
connection devices. Many respondents believe that mobile devices of the
future will have significant computing power. The experts fear that limits set
by governments and/or corporations seeking control might impede positive
evolution and diffusion of these devices; according to respondents, this
scenario’s predicted benefit of “effortless”connectivity is dependent on
corporate and government leaders’willingness to serve the public good.
The overwhelming majority of respondents agreeing with this scenario took note of the
current boom in cell phone and smartphone use and imagined its extension. “By 2020
we should see several billion cell phones shipping per year, most of which will be
Internet-capable; this will probably dwarf the volumes of other Internet-capable
devices, such as PCs,”wrote one anonymous participant.
There are 6.6 billion people in the world, and the UN estimates that 1.2 billion have
access to and use the Internet (2007 figures). Wireless Intelligence, a market database,
reports that it took 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell, just four years for
the second billion, and two years for the third billion.
3
The firm projects there will be 4
billion cell phones in the world by the end of 2008; about 11 percent were Internet-
enabled in 2007, and it is expected that could rise to 15 percent by the end of 2008. (It is
important to remember that some people own more than one mobile phone—in 2007 it
was estimated that 700 million people owned more than one—so 3 billion phones does
not equate to 3 billion people who have and use mobile phones.)
Several survey participants noted in their written elaborations to the survey question
that connectedness serves humanity in so many ways that even people who are
struggling to make a dollar a day in the world’s least-developed nations find the
economics of mobile telephony to be manageable and sometimes even vital to their lives.
“Communication is a basic human need,”responded Howard Rheingold, Internet
sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart Mobs.”“People who are
trying to scrape by have immediate need for connection to information about local labor
and commodities markets. Public-health and disaster-relief information can be an SMS
[short-message-service—or “text”] message away. People in Africa turned paid telephone
minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency, because they had the need to transfer
small amounts of money. Billions of squatters might live in slums but still ingeniously
and often illegally deliver the construction and utilities services they need. There are
already reasons why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use
cheap telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways
to use connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”
Lutfor Rahman, of the Association for Advancement of Information Technology in
Bangladesh, said mobile communication is world-changing. “Before introducing the
mobile phone in remote areas of Bangladesh, the exchange of information was through
physically meeting,”he wrote. “That wasted much time, and sometimes it became
impossible in short time because of lack of communication facilities.”
Gbenga Sesan, a Nigerian and consultant on the use of the Internet for development
for Paradigm Initiative, has written extensively about the use of mobile
communications. “With the rise in the number of mobile phone users across the
continent, it is only wise to start planning that the future will be driven through mobile
phones—governance, businesses, networking, leisure, and more,” he commented. “The
story will be the same across the world. Regardless of technology choice (GSM, CDMA,
etc), mobile telephones will form the core of human interaction and livelihood. And
when you consider the fact that some mobile phones were competing with computers in
2007, you can only wonder if owning a PC will matter by December 31, 2019.”
It Will Be More Computer Than Phone
Many who responded with a further elaboration on this scenario said while the device
we will be using will be small and possibly resemble today’s wireless phones in its shape,
it will actually be a multitasking computer, used less for voice communication than for
other tasks. “The computing power that will be able to fit into a phone-size device in 13
years will be incredible,” wroteananonymousrespondent.
“By 2020 a device that more closely resembles today's mobile phone rather than today's
computer will certainly be the primary connection tool,”said Paul Miller, a technology
evangelist for Talis, a UK-based Web company, and blogger for ZDNet. “Whether it is at
all 'phone'-like, or even used very often for voice-only communication is more open to
question, though.”
Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member, agreed. “By 2020 we'll stop
talking about ‘phones,’ with any luck,” shewrote.“Nor will we be talking about
‘telephony.’ Those terms, I hope, will be dead. These devices will just be handsets of
which we'll be very fond. They'll have screens that are just large enough for us to feel
immersedinthevisualsprovided.Whatwillwebedoing?UsingtheInternet.
Interacting, doing work, talking, participating, uploading to the cloud. By 2020, the
network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been (with any luck) disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world, but they won't be optimized on
billing (as telephone and wireless connections are now). Billions of people will have
joined the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.”
Rich Miller, CEO for Replicate Technologies and an Internet pioneer with ARPANET,
wrote, “The ‘phone’ as such is more likely to be a personal media server/media gateway.
This same personal media server—size not much different than today's mobile phone—
permits varieties of ‘terminal’ devices, including display, voice input/output, etc. Audio
and video interfaces are more likely to be separate devices (like today's Bluetooth
headset, but with more user interface controls).”
Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate dean
at the University of Illinois-Chicago, projected, “By 2020 I don't think it will be so easy
to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop. These will blend into a general
‘mobile computing’ category of device (for which we probably don't yet have a name).”
Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of Voice on the Net Coalition, a senior fellow for
the Benton Foundation and former White House policy advisor, commented, “The
mobile ‘phone’ will largely be eclipsed and replaced by the open network device—an open
mobile computing device also capable of voice. But the assumption is correct that these
mobile devices will be more significant and ubiquitous than wired devices. In terms of
inclusion, there are already developing countries that have set up open and competitive
wireless markets to foster these innovations and reap their benefits. But other developing
countries that still have government-run telecom sectors or that haven’t enabled
wireless competition could be further left behind.”
And Jeff Jarvis, top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of
New York Graduate School of Journalism, and many other respondents said we should
not concentrate on the appliance, but the connectivity. “We will have many devices that
are constantly connected; in that sense, it's connectivity that will be mobile and the
devices will merely plug in,”Jarvis explained. “This will lead to a world that is not only
connected but also live and immediate. Witnesses will share news as they witness it. We
can get answers to any question anytime. We can stay in constant touch with the people
we know, following their lives as we follow RSS and Twitter feeds.”
Respondents Say Mobility Is Key to Sharing Information
Everywhere in the World
In 2007 the bottom three-quarters of the world’s population included about 30 percent
of the people who have Internet access. The 2020 scenario proposed to survey
respondents that this number will rise to 50 percent. Participants agreed that mobile
communications devices—most of them not yet Internet-connected—have made an
amazing impact already and will continue to bridge the digital divide and promote
digital inclusion. Geert Lovink wrote, “We now still look at the world from a 'digital
divide' perspective, but that will soon be of little use. The massive use by the 'emerging'
underclasses of the 'Global South' of mobile phones should be interpreted as a necessity
of the labour force to gain mobility in order to increase their output.”
Charles Kenny, senior economist for the World Bank, the international aid agency,
commented, “The mobile phone will be used for an increasing range of services such as
m-banking in developing countries, but it will also remain key as a tool for voice
communication. For around a quarter of the world's population still officially illiterate
(and many more functionally illiterate), voice telephony will remain the primary means
of communicating over distance.”An anonymous survey participant added, “Voice
communication is the most common method used by humans to communicate, and
devices with voice capabilities will be key.”
Jonne Soininen, Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Society leader and
manager of Internet affairs for Nokia Siemens Network, added, “In many places having
fixed infrastructure is not possible either physically or economically, thus, making
mobile systems the viable option for Internet access.”
Active Internet Society and ICANN participant Cheryl Langdon-Orr said she takes
issue with the figure of 50 percent of the world being connected, and she hopes for more.
“Mobile device connectivity to the Internet is indeed a cost-effective e-future vision for
many,”she wrote, “but in my utopia where the Internet Society states ‘The Internet is
for Everyone’ we would be looking at much more than 50 percent of people being online
by 2020.”
And Sudip Aryal, president of the Nepal Rural Information Technology Development
Society, wrote, “to meet this target of 50 percent or even more than that, each and every
country should make ICT as a national-priority issue. Just like the awareness of
HIV/AIDS and use of condoms, the national and international bodies must launch a
program to aware about the ‘importance of Internet in one's life’ to the grass root
communities.”
Michael Botein, a telecommunications law expert at New York University and
consultant to the Federal Communications Commission, said improved, affordable
mobile technology could help pave the way to a friendlier world. “It is difficult to foresee
a future short of a technological breakthrough in which mobile technology will have
enough bandwidth to provide data services, real-time video, and the like,” he wrote. “On
a positive note, however, cellular will allow the beginnings of universal service in most
parts of the world—as already in Latin America and Africa—and thus may help break
down long-held hostilities.”
Several respondents, including Neil McIntosh, director of editorial development for the
top news site guardian.co.uk, based in London, said, “a greater and more fundamental
problem, however, may be poor literacy and continued widespread poverty, which
technology by itself can't solve.”
Some Experts Express Doubts About Interoperability and Open
Networks
Some of those who chose to mostly agree with this scenario did so while expressing
reservations about parts of it. A number of them suggested that governments and/or
corporations concerned with retaining or gaining more control over use of the Internet
might limit some types of connection in certain parts of the world, and others projected
a potential lack of universal standards and protocols in a world of changing technology.
Michael Zimmer, resident fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School, wrote, “I agree almost entirely with this prediction…My only hesitation is
whether there will be universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, since US mobile providers have shown little interest in providing full
interoperability and open devices to take full advantage of new mobile services.”
Social media research expert danah boyd of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for
Internet and Society wrote, “Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor
populations, and the next five years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal,
and federal governments, handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will
win. If the carriers continue to own the market, network access through mass adoption
of the mobile will be far slower than if governments would begin blanketing their land
with WiFi (or network access on other spectrum channels) as a public-good
infrastructure project and handset makers would begin making cheap accessible
handsets for such access. The latter dynamic would introduce network access (and
telephony) to many more people, much to the chagrin of carriers.”
Ross Rader, a member of the ICANN Registrars Constituency and executive for
Tucows Inc., wrote, “This scenario may likely happen over the next few years, not the
next 12. The only real obstacle to this level of adoption and social integration lies with
the willingness of the telecommunications industry to resist the temptation to segregate
and verticalize its offerings. In other words, the communications network market must
be made much more competitive than it is today. Handsets need to be freed from
applications, and applications need to be freed from networks. Only truly open networks
will drive the sort of adoption envisaged in this scenario. We are starting to see the first
glimpses of this today with Google's Android, Verizon's open network initiative, the
power of the iPhone, but much work in all of these, and other, areas remains to be done
before the networks, applications, and handsets markets are fully competitive.”
A few respondents said they believe corporate leaders are interested in the positive
diffusion of affordable technology tools to less-developed areas of the world. Peter Kim,
a senior analyst for Forrester Research, commented, “Handset manufacturers have
already started to focus on countries with lower GDP. Continued efficiency in
production and increase in computing power, along with the natural desire of humans
to connect will help make this scenario a reality.”
Many survey participants expressed concerns about pricing. One anonymous respondent
wrote, “The success of the mobile phone as a universal-access device is contingent on
adoption of flat-rate style charges, as is normal for Internet applications, rather than
high per-minute charges which currently dominate mobile-pricing structures.”
Bandwidth, Screen Size, Poor User-Interface Are Among the
Other Potential Limits Cited
Some respondents who mostly disagreed with the scenario wrote that delivery will
continue to be more efficient through earth-based connections. “Wireless doesn't ever
provide as much bandwidth as wired connections; wireless will always be slower, thus
second-best,” wrote one anonymous respondent. “Primary ‘work’ will still be done over
wired connections, with wireless filling in the gaps and supporting mobile applications.”
Another wrote, “Will there be enough wireless infrastructure for truly complex Internet
applications on a phone?”
Another more multi-layered response in regard to limitations of the scenario came from
an anonymous survey participant: “Wireless technologies have a number of inherent
problems including but not limited to interference and capacity. The simple log trend of
traffic and data patterns precludes wireless. While some form of ubiquitous wireless
access will be available most places, fibre will be more important than ever. Phones also
have UI restrictions, any conception of phones without other peripheral interfacing
technologies such as HUDS eye movement/brain interfaces simply will not meet the
needs.”
“Unless the phone—which will really be seen as the one device that we carry around that
includes voice, text, still/video camera, GPS, AV player, computer, voice-to -digital-
information interface, Internet, television, bank account, etc.—has the capacity to
project at least a 15" display, it will be too small to use as the primary connection tool for
the majority of world-wide users,” wrote Peter Eckart, director of health information
technology for the Illinois Public Health Institute. “The majority of us will carry our
digital presence indicator with us from place to place on that device, but the bandwidth
and interface will be provided by our home or work or coffee shop, with the device there
to maintain digital identity. I do agree that the mobile device will be the primary or only
connection for poorer folks. People's wealth or income will be reflected in the size of their
display, the number of Ds (2 or 3), their connection speed, amount of digital storage,
and most importantly, their level of access to information stores.”
Adrian Schofield, a leader in the World Information Technology and Services Alliance
and manager of applied research at the Johannesburg Center for Software Engineering
in South Africa, wrote that people will use multiple devices. “There are likely to be two
distinct types of hand-held device—the mobile phone and the mobile PDA,”he
commented. “The phone will be the instrument that enables the less economically
empowered people to communicate by voice and text and to perform basic financial and
government transactions. The PDA will offer the full range of communications and
computing facilities, including TV, GPS, and video camera. Using improved solar
technology, battery life will be significantly extended and offices, hotels, and other
venues will provide free plasma screens for those who wish to access a larger image than
the one offered on the device.”
Well-known economist and technology expert Hal Varian, of Google and the
University of California-Berkeley, responded, “The big problem with the cell phone is the
UI [user interface], particularly on the data side. We are waiting for a breakthrough.”
Fabrice Florin, the executive director of NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news
network, wrote, “While I agree that the mobile phone will play a growing role as a low-
cost computing platform, I disagree that it will be the 'primary Internet connection and
the only one for a majority of the people across the world.' Other computing platforms
and connectivity options will become widely available by then, such as cheap computers
(or wall-based computing environments) with landline or comparable broadband
connections. I predict that these faster connections and larger-screen platforms will be
more affordable and effective from a productivity standpoint than small and slow
mobile platforms.”
One Laptop Per Child Is Seen as Limited
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a large-scale US-based project to provide affordable,
practical computing and Internet capabilities to people in underserved communities
around the world. The effort has brought together people from the technology industry,
non-governmental organizations, and governments in the process of designing,
manufacturing, and distributing these tools.
The Future of the Internet III survey was distributed at about the same time the OLPC
computers became available; they have come under some criticism in the popular
media, and they met some criticism from survey participants. Scott Smith wrote,
“OLPC-style efforts are already beginning to fragment at the start of 2008 even before
the actual OLPC initiative gains any real ground.”Seth Finkelstein wrote, “One
Laptop Per Child is a classic ‘ugly American’-style project.”
Charles Ess, an online culture and ethics researcher from Drury University and a
leader of the Association of Internet Researchers, commented, “The One Laptop Per
Child initiative is foundering not so much on issues of economics, but more on issues of
culture. Most of the non-Western ‘targets’ for the initiative use languages that are not
easily captured through the use of the standard Roman keyboard. More broadly, the
literacy required to manipulate most computer-based communications technologies and
venues is not to be taken for granted among all populations and demographic groups—
certainly not within the US and Western Europe, much less through other cultures in
which orality still predominates (e.g., indigenous peoples). For that, mobile phones
present a relatively straightforward interface—and talking, for most people at least, is
easy! In short, talking via a phone is far more universally realizable than presuming
everyone will be able and willing to communicate via a Roman keyboard and an
expensive computer.”
Some Say 2020 Will Offer a New Paradigm
Some survey participants said this scenario as written is shortsighted and we will have
moved into a different communications environment. “A new technology will blow all of
this away,”wrote one anonymous respondent, and another wrote, “Another ‘killer app’
will emerge before 2020 that will change everything; communication will not achieve
stability in the 21
st
century.”
View Report Online:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/The-Future-of -the-Internet-III.aspx
Pew Internet & American Life Project
An initiative of the Pew Research Center
1615 L St., NW – Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20036
202-419-4500 | pewinternet.org
Summary of Findings 3
Acknowledgements 15
Background 16
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
20
Scenario 2: The Internet and the Evolution of
Social Tolerance
29
Scenario 3: The Evolution of IP Law and Copyright
Protection
35
Scenario 4: The Evolution of Privacy, Identity, and
Forgiveness
46
Scenario 5: The Evolution of Augmented Reality
and Virtual Reality
60
Scenario 6: The Evolution of the Internet User
Interface
72
Scenario 7: The Evolution of the Architecture of
the Internet
81
Scenario 8: The Evolving Concept of Time for
Work, Leisure
91
Pew Internet & American Life Project
The Future of the Internet III | 17
Lee Rainie
Director
Janna Anderson
The Future of the Internet III
A survey of experts shows they expect major tech
advances as the phone becomes a primary device for
online access, voice-recognition improves, and the
structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree
about whether this will lead to more social tolerance,
more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.
December 2008
CONTENTS
Summary of Findings
NOTES
1
The results of the first survey can be found at:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf. 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 be found at
the website for “Imagining the Internet”at http://www.elon.edu/predictions/default.html.
Acknowledgements
Background
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
Findings
Technology stakeholders and critics were asked in an online survey to assess
scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the
Internet and they said the following:
l
The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for
most people in the world in 2020.
l
The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will
not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or
forgiveness.
l
Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more
prevalent and accepted by 2020.
l
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.
l
The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical
and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected,
and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
l
“Next-generation”engineering of the network to improve the current
Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the
architecture from scratch.
About the Methodology and Interpreting the Findings
This is the third canvassing of Internet specialists and analysts by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project.
1
While a wide range of opinion from experts, organizations, and
interested institutions was sought, this survey should not be taken as a representative
canvassing of Internet experts. By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting
effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample.
Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this
survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life
in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total
of 1,196 participants who shared their views.
Experts were located in two ways. First, nearly a thousand were identified in an
extensive canvassing of scholarly, government, and business documents from the period
1990-1995 to see who had ventured predictions about the future impact of the Internet.
Several hundred of them participated in the first two surveys conducted by Pew Internet
and Elon University, and they were recontacted for this survey. Second, expert
participants were hand-picked due to their positions as stakeholders in the development
of the Internet or they were reached through the leadership listservs of top technology
organizations including the Internet Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the
World Wide Web Consortium, the United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet
Governance, Internet2, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, International Telecommunication
Union, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Association of Internet
Researchers, and the American Sociological Association's Information Technology
Research section. For the first time, some respondents were invited to participate
through personal messages sent using a social network, Facebook.
In all, 578 experts identified through these channels responded to the survey.
While many respondents are at the pinnacle of Internet leadership, some of the survey
respondents are “working in the trenches” of building the Web. Most of the people in this
latter segment of responders came to the survey by invitation because they are on the
email list of the Pew Internet & American Life Project or are otherwise known to the
Project. They are not necessarily opinion leaders for their industries or well-known
futurists, but it is striking how much their views were distributed in ways that paralleled
those who are celebrated in the technology field.
In all, 618 additional respondents participated in this survey from these quarters. Thus,
the expert results are reported as the product of 578 responses and the lines listing “all
responses” include these additional 618 participants.
This report presents the views of respondents in two ways. First, we cite the aggregate
views of those who responded to our survey. Second, we have quoted many of their
opinions and predictions in the body of this report, and even more of their views are
available on the Elon University-Pew Internet & American Life Project Web site:
http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org/. Scores more responses to each of the scenarios
are cited on specific web pages devoted to each scenarios. Those urls are given in the
chapters devoted to the scenarios.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: Themes Many Respondents Struck in
Their Answers
Here are some of the major themes that run through respondents’ answers:
The mobile phone will be the dominant connection tool:More than three-
quarters of the expert respondents (77%) agreed with a scenario that posited that the
mobile computing device—with more-significant computing power in 2020—will be the
primary Internet communications platform for a majority of people across the world.
They agreed that connection will generally be offered under a set of universal standards
internationally, though many registered doubts about corporations’ and regulators’
willingnesstomakeithappen.
Heightened social tolerance may not be a Web 2.0 result:Respondents were
asked if people will be more tolerant in 2020 than they are today. Some 56% of the
expert respondents disagreed with a scenario positing that social tolerance will advance
significantly by then, saying communication networks also expand the potential for
hate, bigotry, and terrorism. Some 32% predicted tolerance will grow. A number of the
survey participants indicated that the divide between the tolerant and intolerant could
possibly be deepened because of information-sharing tactics people use on the Internet.
Air-typing, touch interfaces, and talking to devices will become common: A
notable majority of the respondents (64%) favored the idea that by 2020 user interfaces
will offer advanced talk, touch, and typing options, and some added a fourth “T”—think.
Those who chose to elaborate in extended responses disagreed on which of the four will
make the most progress by 2020. There was a fairly even yes-no split on the likely
success of voice-recognition or significant wireless keyboard advances and mostly
positive support of the advance of interfaces involving touch and gestures—this was
highly influenced by the introduction of the iPhone and various multitouch surface
computing platforms in 2007 and 2008. A number of respondents projected the
possibility of a thought-based interface—neural networks offering mind-controlled
human-computer interaction. Many expressed concerns over rude, overt public displays
by people using ICTs (“yakking away on their phones about their latest foot fungus”)
and emphasized the desire for people to keep private communications private in future
digital interfaces.
IP law and copyright will remain unsettled:Three out of five respondents (60%)
disagreed with the idea that legislatures, courts, the technology industry, and media
companies will exercise effective content control by 2020. They said “cracking”
technology will stay ahead of technology to control intellectual property (IP) or policy
regulating IP. And they predicted that regulators will not be able to come to a global
agreement about intellectual property. Many respondents suggested that new economic
models will have to be implemented, with an assumption that much that was once
classified as paid content will have to be offered free or in exchange for attention or
some other unit of value. Nearly a third of the survey respondents (31%) agreed that IP
regulation will be successful by 2020; they said more content will be privatized, some
adding that this control might be exercised at the hardware level, through Internet-
access devices such as smartphones.
The division between personal and professional time will disappear:A
majority of expert respondents (56%) agreed with the statement that in 2020 “few lines
(will) divide professional from personal time, and that’s OK.” While some people are
hopeful about a hyperconnected future with more freedom, flexibility, and life
enhancements, others express fears that mobility and ubiquity of networked computing
devices will be harmful for most people by adding to stress and challenging family life
and social life.
Network engineering research will build on the status quo—there isn’t likely
to be a “next-gen ”Internet:Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) said they
think the original Internet architecture will still be in place in 2020 even as it is
continually being refined. They did not believe the current Internet will be replaced by a
completely new “next-generation”system between now and 2020. Those who wrote
extended elaborations to their answers projected the expectation that IPv6 and the
Semantic Web will be vital elements in the continuing development of the Internet over
the next decade. Among other predictions: there will be more “walled gardens,”
separated Internet spaces, created by governments and corporations to maintain
network control; governments and corporations will leverage security fears to retain
power over individuals; crime, piracy, terror, and other negatives will always be
common elements in an open system.
Transparency may or may not make the world a better place:Respondents
were split evenly on whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater
transparency of people and institutions afforded by the Internet: 45% of expert
respondents agreed that transparency of organizations and individuals will heighten
individual integrity and forgiveness and 44% disagreed. The comments about this
prediction were varied: Some argued that transparency is an unstoppable force that has
positives and negatives; it might somehow influence people to live lives in which
integrity and forgiveness are more likely. Others posited that transparency won’t have
any positive influence, in fact it makes everyone vulnerable, and bad things will happen
because of it. Still others argued that the concept of “privacy” is changing, it is becoming
scarce, and it will be protected and threatened by emerging innovations; tracking and
databasing will be ubiquitous; reputation maintenance and repair will be required; some
people will have multiple digital identities; some people will withdraw.
Augmented reality and interactive virtual spaces might see more action:More
than half of respondents (55%) agreed with the notion that many lives will be touched in
2020 by virtual worlds, mirror worlds, and augmented reality. Yet 45% either disagreed
or didn’t anwer this question, so the sentiment isn’t overwhelming. People’s definitions
for the terms “augmented reality”and “virtual reality” are quite varied; smartphones
and GPS help people augment reality to a certain extent today and are expected to do
more soon; many think today’s social networks qualify as a form of virtual reality while
others define it in terms of Second Life or something even more immersive. Some noted
that by 2020 augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will have reached the
point of blurring with reality. Many indicated this will enhance the world, providing new
opportunities for conferencing, teaching, and 3-D modeling, and some added that
breakthroughs to come may bring significant change, including fusion with other
developments, such as genetic engineering. Some respondents expressed fear of the
negatives of AR and VR, including: new extensions of the digital divide; an increase in
violence and obesity; and the potential for addiction or overload. There is agreement that
user interfaces have to be much more intuitive for AR and VR to become more
universally adopted.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: A Sample of Revealing Quotations and
Predictions Selected from the Thousands Submitted
The evolution of the device for connection:“People in Africa turned paid
telephone minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency…There are already reasons
why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use cheap
telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways to use
connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”—Howard
Rheingold, Internet sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart
Mobs”
“By 2020, the network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world…Billions of people will have joined
the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.” —Susan Crawford,
founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) board member
“Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor populations, and the next five
years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal, and federal governments,
handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will win.”—danah boyd,
Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
“Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era—like transistor radios are
today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard
communications chip on many devices. We'll probably carry some kind of screen-based
reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to
communicate verbally, we'll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.” —Josh
Quittner, executive editor of Fortune Magazine and longtime technology journalist
and editor
The evolution of social tolerance: “Not in mankind’s nature. The first global satellite
link-up was 1967, BBC's Our World: the Beatles ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and we still have
war, genocide, and assassination (Lennon's poignantly).”—Adam Peake, policy
analyst for the Center for Global Communications and participant in the World
Summit on the Information Society
“Polarization will continue and the people on the extremes will be less tolerant of those
opposite them. At the same time, within homogenous groups (religious, political, social,
financial, etc.) greater tolerance will likely occur.”—Don Heath, Internet pioneer and
former president and CEO of the Internet Society
“Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or
kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, since one's real-world
surroundings will not have the homogeneity of one's online clan.”—Jim Horning,
chief scientist for information security at SPARTA Inc. and a founder of InterTrust’s
Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory
The evolution of intellectual property law and copyright: “Many people want IP
protection, but everyone wants to steal. Regardless of the legal mechanisms so far—e.g.,
automatic damages, compulsory copyrights—many people would prefer the illegal route,
perhaps because it runs up their adrenaline.” —Michael Botein, founding director of
the Media Law Center at New York University Law School
“Copying data is the natural state of computers; we would have to try to compromise
them too much to support this regime.”—Brad Templeton, chairman of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
“While I applaud the efforts of DRM [digital rights management] opponents, I am
discouraged by the progress DRM seems to continue to make in hardware as much as in
software. Having purchased an iPhone, I was delighted when Apple updated its software
to allow custom ringtones, only to discover that I needed to pay for a ringtone via the
iTunes Music Store even though the ringtone I wanted to use was one in which I own
the copyright!”—Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers
and editor of New Media & Society
“There will be cross-linking of content provider giants and Internet service provider
giants and that they will find ways to milk every last ‘currency unit’ out of the unwitting
and defenseless consumer. Governments will be strongly influenced by the business
conglomerates and will not do much to protect consumers. (Just think of the outrageous
rates charged by cable and phone company TV providers and wireless phone providers
today—it will only get worse.)” —Steve Goldstein, ICANN board member formerly of
the US National Science Foundation
“Copyright is a dead duck in a digital world. The old regime based its power on high
distribution costs. Those costs are going to zero. Bye-bye DRM.” —Dan Lynch, founder
of CyberCash and Interop Company, now a board member of the Santa Fe Institute
“You cannot stop a tide with a spoon. Cracking technology will always be several steps
ahead of DRM and content will be redistributed on anonymous networks.”—Giulio
Prisco, chief executive of Metafuturing Second Life, formerly of CERN
The evolution of privacy and transparency: “We will enter a time of mutually
assured humiliation; we all live in glass houses. That will be positive for tolerance and
understanding, but—even more important—I believe that young people will not lose
touch with their friends as my generation did and that realization of permanence in
relationships could—or should—lead to more care in those relationships.” —Jeff Jarvis,
top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of New York
Graduate School of Journalism
“Gen Y has a new notion of privacy. The old ‘never trust anyone over 30’ will turn into
‘never trust anyone who doesn't have embarrassing stuff online.’”—Jerry Michalski,
founder and president of Sociate
“Viciousness will prevail over civility, fraternity, and tolerance as a general rule, despite
the build-up of pockets or groups ruled by these virtues. Software will be unable to stop
deeper and more hard-hitting intrusions into intimacy and privacy, and these will
continue to happen.” —Alejandro Pisanty, ICANN and Internet Society leader and
directorofcomputerservicesatUniversidadNacionalAutónomadeMéxico
“By 2020, the Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by
businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have
happily traded their privacy—consciously or unconsciously—for consumer benefits such
as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and
manipulation will have largely disappeared.”—Nicholas Carr, author of the Rough
Type blog and “The Big Switch”
“The volume and ubiquity of personal information, clicktrails, personal media, etc., will
desensitize us. A super-abundance of transparency will lose its ability to shock. Maybe
there will be software-driven real-time reputation insurance service, offering monitoring
and repair to dinged reputations. This could be as ordinary as auto insurance or
mortgage insurance is today, and as automated as the nightly backups performed by
most online businesses. I don't agree that this will make us any kinder.”—Havi
Hoffman, Yahoo Developer Network
The evolution of augmented and virtual reality: “Mirror worlds are multi-
dimensional experiences with profound implications for education, medicine, and social
interaction. ‘Real life’ as we know it is over. Soon when anyone mentions reality, the
first question we will ask is, ‘Which reality are you referring to?’ We will choose our
realities, and in each reality there will be truths germane to that reality, and so we will
choose our truth as well.”—Barry Chudakov, principal with the Chudakov Company
“We in the present don't think of ourselves as living in ‘cyberspace,’ even though people
of a decade previous would have termed it such. Of the various forms of the metaverse,
however, the majority of activity will take place in blended or augmented-reality spaces,
not in distinct virtual/alternative world spaces.”—Jamais Cascio, a co-author of the
“Metaverse Roadmap Overview,”a report on the potential futures of VR, AR, and the
geoWeb
“Augmented reality will become nearly the de facto interface standard by 2020, with 2-
D and 3-D overlays over real-world objects providing rich information, context,
entertainment, and (yes) promotions and offers. At the same time, a metaverse
(especially when presented in an augmented-reality-overlay environment) provides
compelling ways to facilitate teamwork and collaboration while reducing overall travel
budgets.” —Jason Stoddard, managing partner at Centric/Agency of Change
“The virtual world removes all barriers of human limitation; you can be anyone you
want to be instead of being bound by physical and material limitations. That allows
people to be who they naturally are, freed of any perception they may have of
themselves based on their ‘real life’—it is the power of removing the barriers of your own
perception of yourself.” —Tze-Meng Tan, Multimedia Development Corporation in
Malaysia, a director at OpenSOS
“We are in the last generation of human fighter pilots. Already, drones in Iraq are
piloted in San Diego. What will improve is the ability of the artificial spaces to control
physical reality, to expand our reach more effectively in many aspects of the physical
universe.” —Dick Davies, partner at Project Management and Control Inc. and a past
president of the Association of Information Technology Professionals
“In a reaction to the virtual world, entrepreneurs will establish ‘virt-free’ zones where
reality is not augmented. In various heavily connected areas, there will be sanctuaries
(hotels, restaurants, bars, summer camps, vehicles) which people may visit to separate
themselves from adhesion or other realities.”—C.R. Roberts, Vancouver-based
technology reporter
“For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend, certain pundits can seriously
propose that the wave of the future is chatting using electronic hand-puppets. Flight
Simulator is not an aircraft, and typing at a screen is not an augmentation of the real
world.” —Seth Finkelstein, author of the Infothought blog, writer and programmer
“A map is not the territory and a letter is not the person. We have always had multiple
facades, for most, most common, work, home and play. The extension into more
immersive ‘unreal’ worlds is going to happen.”—Hamish MacEwen, consultant at
Open ICT in New Zealand
The evolution of user interfaces: “There will be ‘subvocal’ inputs that detect ‘almost
speech’ thatyouwill,butdonotactuallyvoice.Smallsensorsonteethwillalsoletyou
tap commands. Your eyeballs will track desires, sensed by your eyeglasses. And so on.”
—David Brin, futurist and author of “The Transparent Society”
“WiFi- and WiMax-enabled badges with voice recognition will act as personal
assistants—allowing you to talk with someone by saying their name, to post a voice blog,
or access directions from the Internet for the task at hand.”—Jim Kohlenberger,
director of Voice on the Net Coalition; senior fellow at the Benton Foundation
“I could see a whole physical way of communicating with our technology tools that
could be part of our health and exercise. A day answering e-mails could be a full-on
physical workout ; )….”—Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards
“We will see the display interface device separated from the input device over the next 12
years. Display devices will be everywhere, and you will be able to use them with your
input device. The input device might be virtual, as in the case of the iPhone or a
holographic keyboard, or they might resemble the keyboards and touchpads that people
are using today.”—Ross Rader, a director with Tucows who is active in the ICANN
Registrars constituency
“While air-typing and haptic gestures are widespread and ubiquitous, the arrival of
embedded optical displays, thought-transcription, eye-movement tracking, and
predictive-behavior modeling will fundamentally alter the human-computer interaction
model.” —Sean Steele, CEO and senior security consultant for infoLock Technologies
The evolution of network architecture: “The control-oriented telco (ITU) next-
generation network will not fully evolve, the importance of openness and enabling
innovation from the edges will prevail; i.e. Internet will essentially retain the key
characteristics we enjoy today, mainly because there's more money to be made.”—
Adam Peake, executive research fellow and telecommunications policy analyst at the
Center for Global Communications
“Some parts of the Internet may fragment, as nations pursue their own technology
trajectories. The Internet is so vastly complex, incremental upgrades seem to be the only
way to get anything done…Places like China may make big leaps and bounds because
there is less legacy.” —Anthony Townsend, research director, The Institute for the
Future
“Current Internet standards bodies and core Internet protocols are ossifying to such an
extent that security and performance requirements for next-generation applications will
require a totally new base platform. If current Internet base protocols survive, it will be
as a substrata paved over by new-generation smarter ways of connecting.”—Ian
Peter, Ian Peter and Associates and the Internet Mark 2 Project
“The Web must still be a messy, fabulous, exciting, dangerous, poetic, depressing, elating
place...akin to life; which is not a bad thing.”—Luis Santos, Universidade do Minho-
Braga, Portugal
“When have we ever stopped crime? If it is a choice between having some criminals
around and having a repressive government, I will take the former; they are much
easier to deal with.” —Leonard Witt, associate professor at Kennesaw State University
in Georgia and author of the Webog PJNet.org
“The Internet is not magical; it will be utterly over-managed by commercial concerns,
hobbled with ‘security’ micromanagement, and turned into money-shaped traffic for
business, the rest 90% paid-for content download and the rest of the bandwidth used for
market feedback.”—Tom Jennings, University of California-Irvine, creator of FidoNet
and builder of Wired magazine’s first online site
The evolution of work life and home life activity: “Corporate control of workers’
time—in the guise of work/ family balance—now extends to detailed monitoring of
when people are on and off work. The company town is replaced by ‘company time-
management,’ and it is work time that drives all other time uses. This dystopia
challenges the concept of white-collar work, and unionism is increasingly an issue.”—
Steve Sawyer, associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and
Technology, Penn State University
“The result may be longer, less-efficient working hours and more stressful home life.”—
Victoria Nash, director of graduate studies and policy and research officer, the
Oxford Internet Institute
“It’s already happened, for better or worse. Get over it.”—Anonymous respondent
(Many additional thoughtful and provocative comments appear in the main report.)
This Report Builds on the Online Resource Imagining the
Internet: A History and Forecast
At the invitation of Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project,
Elon University associate professor Janna Quitney Anderson began a research initiative
in the spring semester of 2003 to search for comments and predictions about the future
impact of the Internet during the time when the World Wide Web and browsers
emerged, between 1990 and 1995. The idea was to replicate the fascinating work of
Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective
Technology Assessment. Elon students, faculty, and staff studied government
documents, technology newsletters, conference proceedings, trade newsletters, and the
business press and gathered predictions about the future of the Internet. Eventually,
more than 4,000 early '90s predictions from about 1,000 people were amassed.
The early 1990s predictions are available in a searchable database online at the site
Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast and they are also the basis for a book
by Anderson titled Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives
(2005, Rowman & Littlefield).
The fruits of that work inspired additional research into the past and future of the
Internet, and the Imagining the Internet Web site
(www.imaginingtheInternet.org/) )—now numbering about 6,200 pages—includes
results from the entire series of Future of the Internet surveys, video and audio
interviews showcasing experts' predictions about the next 10 to 50 years, a children's
section, tips for teachers, a “Voices of the People” section on which anyone can post his
or her prediction, and information about the recent history of communications
technology.
We expect the site will continue to serve as a valuable resource for researchers, policy
makers, students, and the general public for decades to come. Further, we encourage
readers of this report to enter their own predictions at the site.
The series of Future of the Internet surveys is also published in book form by Cambria
Press.
Acknowledgements
About the Pew Internet & American Life Project : The Pew Internet Project is an
initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit “fact tank”that provides information
on the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping America and the world. Pew Internet
explores the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, the work place,
schools,healthcare,andcivic/politicallife.TheProjectisnonpartisanandtakesno
position on policy issues. Support for the project is provided by The Pew Charitable
Trusts. The Project’s Web site URL is: http://www.pewinternet.org.
Princeton Survey Research Associates International: PSRAI conducted the
survey that is covered in this report. It is an independent research company specializing
insocialandpolicywork.Thefirmdesigns,conductsandanalyzessurveysworldwide.
Itsexpertisealsoincludesqualitativeresearchandcontentanalysis.Withofficesin
Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., PSRAI serves the needs of clients around
thenationandtheworld.Thefirmcanbereachedat911CommonsWay,Princeton,
N.J. 08540, by telephone at 609-924-9204, by fax at 609-924-7499, or by email at
ResearchNJ@PSRA.com
The Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University’s School of
Communications: TheImaginingtheInternetCenteratElonUniversityholdsa
mirror to humanity’s use of communications technologies, informs policy development,
exposes potential futures, and provides a historic record. It has teamed with the Pew
Internet Project to complete a number of research studies, including the building of
Imagining the Internet (a foresight and history Web site), a survey of stakeholders at
the UN-administrated Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, and an
ethnographic study of a small town, “One Neighborhood, One Week on the Internet,”
all under the direction of Janna Quitney Anderson. For contact regarding Imagining the
Internet, send e-mail to predictions@elon.edu. The university site is:
http://www.elon.edu/.
Introduction
Predictions often inspire lively discussion about the future and they can help
stakeholders prepare to make adjustments to meet the needs associated with
technological change. Those who think about the future are best poised to influence it
and cope with it.
Many futurists, scientists, and long-term thinkers today argue that the acceleration of
technological change over the past decade has greatly increased the importance of
strategic vision. Technology innovations will continue to impact us. The question is
whether this process will reflect thoughtful planning or wash over us like an unstoppable
wave. This survey is aimed at gathering a collection of opinions regarding the
possibilities we all face.
How the Surveys Originated and Have Been Conducted
This research project got its start in mid-2001, when Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew
Internet & American Life Project, approached officials at Elon University with an idea
that the Project and the University might replicate the work of Ithiel de Sola Pool in his
1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment. Pool
and his students had looked at primary official documents, technology community
publications, speeches given by government and business leaders, and marketing
literature at the turn of the 20
th
Century to examine the kind of impacts experts thought
the telephone would have on Americans’ social and economic lives.
The idea was to apply Pool’s research method to the Internet, particularly focused on the
period between 1990 and 1995 when the World Wide Web and Web browsers emerged.
In the spring semester of 2003, Janna Quitney Anderson, a professor of journalism and
communications at Elon, led a research initiative that set out to accomplish this goal.
More than 4,200 predictive statements made in the early 1990s by 1,000 people were
logged and categorized. The result is available on the site Imagining the Internet: A
History and Forecast (www.imaginingtheInternet.org/).
We reasoned that if experts and technologists had been so thoughtful in the early 1990s
about what was going to happen, they would likely be equally as insightful looking
ahead from this moment. In 2004, we asked most of those whose predictions were in
the 1990-1995 database and additional experts to assess a number of predictions about
the coming decade, and their answers were codified in an initial futures survey: “The
Future of the
Internet” (http://www.pewInternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf).
Several years later, we repeated the process with some new predictions and an expanded
base of experts. In late 2005 and the first quarter of 2006, the Pew Internet Project
issued an e-mail invitation to a select group of technology thinkers, stakeholders, and
social analysts, asking them to complete the second scenario-based quantitative and
qualitative survey, “The Future of the Internet II.”The official analysis of the results of
that survey is available here:
http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet_2006.pdf
And we report here the results of a third survey that was conducted online between
December 26, 2007 and March 3, 2008. Some 1,196 people were generous enough to
take the time to respond to this Future of the Internet III online survey.
Nearly half of the Future III respondents are Internet pioneers who were online before
1993.Roughlyonefifthoftherespondentssaytheyliveandworkinanationoutsideof
North America.
The respondents' answers represent their personal views and in no way reflect the
perspectives of their employers. Many survey participants were hand-picked due to their
positions as stakeholders in the development of the Internet or they were reached
through the leadership listservs of top technology organizations including the Internet
Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the World Wide Web Consortium, the
United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, Internet2, Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, International Telecommunication Union, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, Association of Internet Researchers, and the American Sociological
Association's Information Technology Research section.
About the Survey Participants
Many top Internet leaders, activists, and commentators participated in the survey,
including Clay Shirky, Fred Baker, David Brin, Susan Crawford, Brad Templeton,
Howard Rheingold, Jim Kohlenberger, Josh Quittner, Seth Finkelstein, danah boyd, Hal
Varian, Jeff Jarvis, Anthony Rutkowski, Michael Botein, Steve Jones, Richard Bartle,
Alejandro Pisanty, Tom Vest, Milton Mueller, Bernardo Huberman, Jonne Soininen,
Don Heath, Doug Brent, Anthony Townsend, Steve Goldstein, Adam Peake, Basil
Crozier, Craig Partridge, Sebastien Bachollet, Geert Lovink, James Jay Horning, Dan
Lynch, Fernando Barrio, Roberto Gaetano, Christian Huitema, Susan Mernit, Jamais
Cascio, Norbert Klein, Tapio Varis, Martin Boyle, Ian Peter, Todd Spraggins, Catherine
Fitzpatrick, Tom Keller, Charles Kenny, Robert Cannon, Hakikur Rahman, Larry
Lannom, David Farrar, John Levine, Cliff Figallo, Sebastien Ricciardi, Lea Shaver, Seth
Gordon, Jim McConnaughey, Neil Mcintosh, Charles Ess, Alan Levin, David W. Maher,
Jonathan Dube, Thomas Vander Wal, Adrian Schofield, Clifford Lynch, Jerry Michalski,
Paul Miller, and David Moschella, to name a few.
A sampling of the workplaces of respondents includes the Internet Society, World Bank,
Booz Allen Hamilton, AT&T Labs, VeriSign, Cisco, Google, BBN Technologies, Fing,
Yahoo Japan, France Telecom, the International Telecommunication Union, Alcatel-
Lucent, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GLOCOM, AfriNIC, Electronic Privacy
Information Center, APNIC, Universiteit Maastricht, Amnesty International, BBC, PBS,
IBM, Microsoft, Forrester Research, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet
and Society, Open Society Institute, Open the Future, Yahoo, First Semantic, CNET,
Microsoft, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, IDG, FCC, Institute for the
Future, 1&1 Internet AG, Moody’s, HP Laboratories, Amazon.com, Gannett,
Lexis/Nexis, Tucows, InternetNZ, ICANN, Oxford Internet Institute, Institute of the
Information Society—Russia, The Center on Media and Society, Online News
Association, Nokia, the Association for the Advancement of Information Technology,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Network Cultures, Nortel,
Disney, DiploFoundation, Information Technology Industry Council, J-Lab,
Information Society Project at Yale University, Santa Fe Institute, the London School of
Economics, the University of California-Berkeley, NASA, the Singapore Internet
Research Center, Princeton University, the federal government of Canada, several policy
divisions of the US government, and many dozens of others.
Participants described their primary area of Internet interest as “research
scientist”(12%); “technology developer or administrator” (11%); “entrepreneur or
business leader” (10%); “author, editor, or journalist” (9%); “futurist or
consultant” (7%); “advocate, voice of the people, or activist user”(5%); “legislator or
politician” (1%); or “pioneer or originator”(2%); however many participants chose
“other”(24%) for this survey question or did not respond (18%).
The Scenarios Were Built to Elicit Deeply Felt Opinions
The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University do not advocate policy
outcomes related to the Internet. The predictive scenarios included in the survey were
structured to provoke reaction, not because we think any of them will necessarily come
tofruition.
The scenarios for this survey and survey analysis were crafted after a study of the
responses from our previous surveys and of the predictions made in reports by the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations
Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, the Metaverse Roadmap, The
Institute for the Future, Global Business Network, and other foresight organizations and
individual foresight leaders.
The 2020 scenarios were constructed to elicit engaged responses to many-layered issues,
so it was sometimes the case that survey participants would agree with most or part of a
scenario, but not all of it. In addition to trying to pack several ideas into each scenario,
we tried to balance them with “good,”“bad,” and “neutral” outcomes. The history of
technology is full of evidence that tech adoption brings both positive and negative
results.
After each portion of the survey we invited participants to write narrative responses
providing an explanation for their answers. Not surprisingly, the most interesting
product of the survey is the ensuing collection of open-ended discussion, predictions, and
analyses written by the participants in response to our material. We have included many
of those responses in this report. A great number of additional responses are included on
the Imagining the Internet site, available at: http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org.
Since participants’ answers evolved in both tone and content as they went through the
questionnaire, the findings in this report are presented in the same order as the original
survey. The respondents were asked to “sign” each written response they were willing to
have credited to them in the Elon-Pew database and in this report. The quotations in the
report are attributed to those who agreed to have their words quoted. When a quote is
not attributed to someone, it is because that person chose not to sign his or her written
answer.
To make this report more readable and include many voices, some of the lengthier
written elaborations have been edited.
Prediction and Reactions
PREDICTION:The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most
people in the world. In 2020, while "one laptop per child" and other initiatives to
bring networked digital communications to everyone are successful on many levels, the
mobile phone—now with significant computing power—is the primary Internet
connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world, providing
information in a portable, well-connected form at a relatively low price. Telephony is
offered under a set of universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, making for reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world
to another. At this point, the "bottom" three-quarters of the world's population account
for at least 50% of all people with Internet access—up from 30% in 2005.
Expert Respondents’Reactions (N=578)
MostlyAgree77%
MostlyDisagree22%
DidNotRespond*%
All Respondents’Reactions (N=1,196)
MostlyAgree81%
MostlyDisagree19%
DidNotRespond*%
Note:Sinceresultsarebasedonanonrandomsample,amarginoferrorcannotbe
computed. The “prediction” was composed to elicit responses and is not a formal
forecast.
Respondents were presented with a brief set of information outlining the status quo of
the issue 2007 that prefaced this scenario. It read:
According to the UN/ITU World Information Society Report 2007, there has been
some progress in improving digital inclusion: In 1997 the nearly three-quarters of the
world's population who lived in low-income and lower-middle-income economies
accounted for just 5% of the world's population with Internet access
2
By 2005, they
accounted for just over 30%. A number of commercial and non-profit agencies are
combining forces to bring inexpensive laptop computers to remote regions of the world
to connect under-served populations. In addition, by the end of 2008 more than half the
world's population is expected to have access to a mobile phone.
Overview of Respondents' Reactions
A significant majority of expert respondents agreed with this predicted
future. The consensus is that mobile devices will continue to grow in
importance because people need to be connected, wherever they are. Cost-
effectiveness and access are also factors driving the use of phones as
connection devices. Many respondents believe that mobile devices of the
future will have significant computing power. The experts fear that limits set
by governments and/or corporations seeking control might impede positive
evolution and diffusion of these devices; according to respondents, this
scenario’s predicted benefit of “effortless”connectivity is dependent on
corporate and government leaders’willingness to serve the public good.
The overwhelming majority of respondents agreeing with this scenario took note of the
current boom in cell phone and smartphone use and imagined its extension. “By 2020
we should see several billion cell phones shipping per year, most of which will be
Internet-capable; this will probably dwarf the volumes of other Internet-capable
devices, such as PCs,”wrote one anonymous participant.
There are 6.6 billion people in the world, and the UN estimates that 1.2 billion have
access to and use the Internet (2007 figures). Wireless Intelligence, a market database,
reports that it took 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell, just four years for
the second billion, and two years for the third billion.
3
The firm projects there will be 4
billion cell phones in the world by the end of 2008; about 11 percent were Internet-
enabled in 2007, and it is expected that could rise to 15 percent by the end of 2008. (It is
important to remember that some people own more than one mobile phone—in 2007 it
was estimated that 700 million people owned more than one—so 3 billion phones does
not equate to 3 billion people who have and use mobile phones.)
Several survey participants noted in their written elaborations to the survey question
that connectedness serves humanity in so many ways that even people who are
struggling to make a dollar a day in the world’s least-developed nations find the
economics of mobile telephony to be manageable and sometimes even vital to their lives.
“Communication is a basic human need,”responded Howard Rheingold, Internet
sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart Mobs.”“People who are
trying to scrape by have immediate need for connection to information about local labor
and commodities markets. Public-health and disaster-relief information can be an SMS
[short-message-service—or “text”] message away. People in Africa turned paid telephone
minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency, because they had the need to transfer
small amounts of money. Billions of squatters might live in slums but still ingeniously
and often illegally deliver the construction and utilities services they need. There are
already reasons why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use
cheap telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways
to use connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”
Lutfor Rahman, of the Association for Advancement of Information Technology in
Bangladesh, said mobile communication is world-changing. “Before introducing the
mobile phone in remote areas of Bangladesh, the exchange of information was through
physically meeting,”he wrote. “That wasted much time, and sometimes it became
impossible in short time because of lack of communication facilities.”
Gbenga Sesan, a Nigerian and consultant on the use of the Internet for development
for Paradigm Initiative, has written extensively about the use of mobile
communications. “With the rise in the number of mobile phone users across the
continent, it is only wise to start planning that the future will be driven through mobile
phones—governance, businesses, networking, leisure, and more,” he commented. “The
story will be the same across the world. Regardless of technology choice (GSM, CDMA,
etc), mobile telephones will form the core of human interaction and livelihood. And
when you consider the fact that some mobile phones were competing with computers in
2007, you can only wonder if owning a PC will matter by December 31, 2019.”
It Will Be More Computer Than Phone
Many who responded with a further elaboration on this scenario said while the device
we will be using will be small and possibly resemble today’s wireless phones in its shape,
it will actually be a multitasking computer, used less for voice communication than for
other tasks. “The computing power that will be able to fit into a phone-size device in 13
years will be incredible,” wroteananonymousrespondent.
“By 2020 a device that more closely resembles today's mobile phone rather than today's
computer will certainly be the primary connection tool,”said Paul Miller, a technology
evangelist for Talis, a UK-based Web company, and blogger for ZDNet. “Whether it is at
all 'phone'-like, or even used very often for voice-only communication is more open to
question, though.”
Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member, agreed. “By 2020 we'll stop
talking about ‘phones,’ with any luck,” shewrote.“Nor will we be talking about
‘telephony.’ Those terms, I hope, will be dead. These devices will just be handsets of
which we'll be very fond. They'll have screens that are just large enough for us to feel
immersedinthevisualsprovided.Whatwillwebedoing?UsingtheInternet.
Interacting, doing work, talking, participating, uploading to the cloud. By 2020, the
network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been (with any luck) disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world, but they won't be optimized on
billing (as telephone and wireless connections are now). Billions of people will have
joined the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.”
Rich Miller, CEO for Replicate Technologies and an Internet pioneer with ARPANET,
wrote, “The ‘phone’ as such is more likely to be a personal media server/media gateway.
This same personal media server—size not much different than today's mobile phone—
permits varieties of ‘terminal’ devices, including display, voice input/output, etc. Audio
and video interfaces are more likely to be separate devices (like today's Bluetooth
headset, but with more user interface controls).”
Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate dean
at the University of Illinois-Chicago, projected, “By 2020 I don't think it will be so easy
to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop. These will blend into a general
‘mobile computing’ category of device (for which we probably don't yet have a name).”
Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of Voice on the Net Coalition, a senior fellow for
the Benton Foundation and former White House policy advisor, commented, “The
mobile ‘phone’ will largely be eclipsed and replaced by the open network device—an open
mobile computing device also capable of voice. But the assumption is correct that these
mobile devices will be more significant and ubiquitous than wired devices. In terms of
inclusion, there are already developing countries that have set up open and competitive
wireless markets to foster these innovations and reap their benefits. But other developing
countries that still have government-run telecom sectors or that haven’t enabled
wireless competition could be further left behind.”
And Jeff Jarvis, top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of
New York Graduate School of Journalism, and many other respondents said we should
not concentrate on the appliance, but the connectivity. “We will have many devices that
are constantly connected; in that sense, it's connectivity that will be mobile and the
devices will merely plug in,”Jarvis explained. “This will lead to a world that is not only
connected but also live and immediate. Witnesses will share news as they witness it. We
can get answers to any question anytime. We can stay in constant touch with the people
we know, following their lives as we follow RSS and Twitter feeds.”
Respondents Say Mobility Is Key to Sharing Information
Everywhere in the World
In 2007 the bottom three-quarters of the world’s population included about 30 percent
of the people who have Internet access. The 2020 scenario proposed to survey
respondents that this number will rise to 50 percent. Participants agreed that mobile
communications devices—most of them not yet Internet-connected—have made an
amazing impact already and will continue to bridge the digital divide and promote
digital inclusion. Geert Lovink wrote, “We now still look at the world from a 'digital
divide' perspective, but that will soon be of little use. The massive use by the 'emerging'
underclasses of the 'Global South' of mobile phones should be interpreted as a necessity
of the labour force to gain mobility in order to increase their output.”
Charles Kenny, senior economist for the World Bank, the international aid agency,
commented, “The mobile phone will be used for an increasing range of services such as
m-banking in developing countries, but it will also remain key as a tool for voice
communication. For around a quarter of the world's population still officially illiterate
(and many more functionally illiterate), voice telephony will remain the primary means
of communicating over distance.”An anonymous survey participant added, “Voice
communication is the most common method used by humans to communicate, and
devices with voice capabilities will be key.”
Jonne Soininen, Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Society leader and
manager of Internet affairs for Nokia Siemens Network, added, “In many places having
fixed infrastructure is not possible either physically or economically, thus, making
mobile systems the viable option for Internet access.”
Active Internet Society and ICANN participant Cheryl Langdon-Orr said she takes
issue with the figure of 50 percent of the world being connected, and she hopes for more.
“Mobile device connectivity to the Internet is indeed a cost-effective e-future vision for
many,”she wrote, “but in my utopia where the Internet Society states ‘The Internet is
for Everyone’ we would be looking at much more than 50 percent of people being online
by 2020.”
And Sudip Aryal, president of the Nepal Rural Information Technology Development
Society, wrote, “to meet this target of 50 percent or even more than that, each and every
country should make ICT as a national-priority issue. Just like the awareness of
HIV/AIDS and use of condoms, the national and international bodies must launch a
program to aware about the ‘importance of Internet in one's life’ to the grass root
communities.”
Michael Botein, a telecommunications law expert at New York University and
consultant to the Federal Communications Commission, said improved, affordable
mobile technology could help pave the way to a friendlier world. “It is difficult to foresee
a future short of a technological breakthrough in which mobile technology will have
enough bandwidth to provide data services, real-time video, and the like,” he wrote. “On
a positive note, however, cellular will allow the beginnings of universal service in most
parts of the world—as already in Latin America and Africa—and thus may help break
down long-held hostilities.”
Several respondents, including Neil McIntosh, director of editorial development for the
top news site guardian.co.uk, based in London, said, “a greater and more fundamental
problem, however, may be poor literacy and continued widespread poverty, which
technology by itself can't solve.”
Some Experts Express Doubts About Interoperability and Open
Networks
Some of those who chose to mostly agree with this scenario did so while expressing
reservations about parts of it. A number of them suggested that governments and/or
corporations concerned with retaining or gaining more control over use of the Internet
might limit some types of connection in certain parts of the world, and others projected
a potential lack of universal standards and protocols in a world of changing technology.
Michael Zimmer, resident fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School, wrote, “I agree almost entirely with this prediction…My only hesitation is
whether there will be universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, since US mobile providers have shown little interest in providing full
interoperability and open devices to take full advantage of new mobile services.”
Social media research expert danah boyd of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for
Internet and Society wrote, “Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor
populations, and the next five years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal,
and federal governments, handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will
win. If the carriers continue to own the market, network access through mass adoption
of the mobile will be far slower than if governments would begin blanketing their land
with WiFi (or network access on other spectrum channels) as a public-good
infrastructure project and handset makers would begin making cheap accessible
handsets for such access. The latter dynamic would introduce network access (and
telephony) to many more people, much to the chagrin of carriers.”
Ross Rader, a member of the ICANN Registrars Constituency and executive for
Tucows Inc., wrote, “This scenario may likely happen over the next few years, not the
next 12. The only real obstacle to this level of adoption and social integration lies with
the willingness of the telecommunications industry to resist the temptation to segregate
and verticalize its offerings. In other words, the communications network market must
be made much more competitive than it is today. Handsets need to be freed from
applications, and applications need to be freed from networks. Only truly open networks
will drive the sort of adoption envisaged in this scenario. We are starting to see the first
glimpses of this today with Google's Android, Verizon's open network initiative, the
power of the iPhone, but much work in all of these, and other, areas remains to be done
before the networks, applications, and handsets markets are fully competitive.”
A few respondents said they believe corporate leaders are interested in the positive
diffusion of affordable technology tools to less-developed areas of the world. Peter Kim,
a senior analyst for Forrester Research, commented, “Handset manufacturers have
already started to focus on countries with lower GDP. Continued efficiency in
production and increase in computing power, along with the natural desire of humans
to connect will help make this scenario a reality.”
Many survey participants expressed concerns about pricing. One anonymous respondent
wrote, “The success of the mobile phone as a universal-access device is contingent on
adoption of flat-rate style charges, as is normal for Internet applications, rather than
high per-minute charges which currently dominate mobile-pricing structures.”
Bandwidth, Screen Size, Poor User-Interface Are Among the
Other Potential Limits Cited
Some respondents who mostly disagreed with the scenario wrote that delivery will
continue to be more efficient through earth-based connections. “Wireless doesn't ever
provide as much bandwidth as wired connections; wireless will always be slower, thus
second-best,” wrote one anonymous respondent. “Primary ‘work’ will still be done over
wired connections, with wireless filling in the gaps and supporting mobile applications.”
Another wrote, “Will there be enough wireless infrastructure for truly complex Internet
applications on a phone?”
Another more multi-layered response in regard to limitations of the scenario came from
an anonymous survey participant: “Wireless technologies have a number of inherent
problems including but not limited to interference and capacity. The simple log trend of
traffic and data patterns precludes wireless. While some form of ubiquitous wireless
access will be available most places, fibre will be more important than ever. Phones also
have UI restrictions, any conception of phones without other peripheral interfacing
technologies such as HUDS eye movement/brain interfaces simply will not meet the
needs.”
“Unless the phone—which will really be seen as the one device that we carry around that
includes voice, text, still/video camera, GPS, AV player, computer, voice-to -digital-
information interface, Internet, television, bank account, etc.—has the capacity to
project at least a 15" display, it will be too small to use as the primary connection tool for
the majority of world-wide users,” wrote Peter Eckart, director of health information
technology for the Illinois Public Health Institute. “The majority of us will carry our
digital presence indicator with us from place to place on that device, but the bandwidth
and interface will be provided by our home or work or coffee shop, with the device there
to maintain digital identity. I do agree that the mobile device will be the primary or only
connection for poorer folks. People's wealth or income will be reflected in the size of their
display, the number of Ds (2 or 3), their connection speed, amount of digital storage,
and most importantly, their level of access to information stores.”
Adrian Schofield, a leader in the World Information Technology and Services Alliance
and manager of applied research at the Johannesburg Center for Software Engineering
in South Africa, wrote that people will use multiple devices. “There are likely to be two
distinct types of hand-held device—the mobile phone and the mobile PDA,”he
commented. “The phone will be the instrument that enables the less economically
empowered people to communicate by voice and text and to perform basic financial and
government transactions. The PDA will offer the full range of communications and
computing facilities, including TV, GPS, and video camera. Using improved solar
technology, battery life will be significantly extended and offices, hotels, and other
venues will provide free plasma screens for those who wish to access a larger image than
the one offered on the device.”
Well-known economist and technology expert Hal Varian, of Google and the
University of California-Berkeley, responded, “The big problem with the cell phone is the
UI [user interface], particularly on the data side. We are waiting for a breakthrough.”
Fabrice Florin, the executive director of NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news
network, wrote, “While I agree that the mobile phone will play a growing role as a low-
cost computing platform, I disagree that it will be the 'primary Internet connection and
the only one for a majority of the people across the world.' Other computing platforms
and connectivity options will become widely available by then, such as cheap computers
(or wall-based computing environments) with landline or comparable broadband
connections. I predict that these faster connections and larger-screen platforms will be
more affordable and effective from a productivity standpoint than small and slow
mobile platforms.”
One Laptop Per Child Is Seen as Limited
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a large-scale US-based project to provide affordable,
practical computing and Internet capabilities to people in underserved communities
around the world. The effort has brought together people from the technology industry,
non-governmental organizations, and governments in the process of designing,
manufacturing, and distributing these tools.
The Future of the Internet III survey was distributed at about the same time the OLPC
computers became available; they have come under some criticism in the popular
media, and they met some criticism from survey participants. Scott Smith wrote,
“OLPC-style efforts are already beginning to fragment at the start of 2008 even before
the actual OLPC initiative gains any real ground.”Seth Finkelstein wrote, “One
Laptop Per Child is a classic ‘ugly American’-style project.”
Charles Ess, an online culture and ethics researcher from Drury University and a
leader of the Association of Internet Researchers, commented, “The One Laptop Per
Child initiative is foundering not so much on issues of economics, but more on issues of
culture. Most of the non-Western ‘targets’ for the initiative use languages that are not
easily captured through the use of the standard Roman keyboard. More broadly, the
literacy required to manipulate most computer-based communications technologies and
venues is not to be taken for granted among all populations and demographic groups—
certainly not within the US and Western Europe, much less through other cultures in
which orality still predominates (e.g., indigenous peoples). For that, mobile phones
present a relatively straightforward interface—and talking, for most people at least, is
easy! In short, talking via a phone is far more universally realizable than presuming
everyone will be able and willing to communicate via a Roman keyboard and an
expensive computer.”
Some Say 2020 Will Offer a New Paradigm
Some survey participants said this scenario as written is shortsighted and we will have
moved into a different communications environment. “A new technology will blow all of
this away,”wrote one anonymous respondent, and another wrote, “Another ‘killer app’
will emerge before 2020 that will change everything; communication will not achieve
stability in the 21
st
century.”
View Report Online:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/The-Future-of -the-Internet-III.aspx
Pew Internet & American Life Project
An initiative of the Pew Research Center
1615 L St., NW – Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20036
202-419-4500 | pewinternet.org
Summary of Findings 3
Acknowledgements 15
Background 16
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
20
Scenario 2: The Internet and the Evolution of
Social Tolerance
29
Scenario 3: The Evolution of IP Law and Copyright
Protection
35
Scenario 4: The Evolution of Privacy, Identity, and
Forgiveness
46
Scenario 5: The Evolution of Augmented Reality
and Virtual Reality
60
Scenario 6: The Evolution of the Internet User
Interface
72
Scenario 7: The Evolution of the Architecture of
the Internet
81
Scenario 8: The Evolving Concept of Time for
Work, Leisure
91
Pew Internet & American Life Project
The Future of the Internet III | 18
Lee Rainie
Director
Janna Anderson
The Future of the Internet III
A survey of experts shows they expect major tech
advances as the phone becomes a primary device for
online access, voice-recognition improves, and the
structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree
about whether this will lead to more social tolerance,
more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.
December 2008
CONTENTS
Summary of Findings
NOTES
1
The results of the first survey can be found at:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf. 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 be found at
the website for “Imagining the Internet”at http://www.elon.edu/predictions/default.html.
Acknowledgements
Background
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
Findings
Technology stakeholders and critics were asked in an online survey to assess
scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the
Internet and they said the following:
l
The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for
most people in the world in 2020.
l
The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will
not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or
forgiveness.
l
Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more
prevalent and accepted by 2020.
l
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.
l
The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical
and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected,
and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
l
“Next-generation”engineering of the network to improve the current
Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the
architecture from scratch.
About the Methodology and Interpreting the Findings
This is the third canvassing of Internet specialists and analysts by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project.
1
While a wide range of opinion from experts, organizations, and
interested institutions was sought, this survey should not be taken as a representative
canvassing of Internet experts. By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting
effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample.
Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this
survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life
in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total
of 1,196 participants who shared their views.
Experts were located in two ways. First, nearly a thousand were identified in an
extensive canvassing of scholarly, government, and business documents from the period
1990-1995 to see who had ventured predictions about the future impact of the Internet.
Several hundred of them participated in the first two surveys conducted by Pew Internet
and Elon University, and they were recontacted for this survey. Second, expert
participants were hand-picked due to their positions as stakeholders in the development
of the Internet or they were reached through the leadership listservs of top technology
organizations including the Internet Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the
World Wide Web Consortium, the United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet
Governance, Internet2, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, International Telecommunication
Union, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Association of Internet
Researchers, and the American Sociological Association's Information Technology
Research section. For the first time, some respondents were invited to participate
through personal messages sent using a social network, Facebook.
In all, 578 experts identified through these channels responded to the survey.
While many respondents are at the pinnacle of Internet leadership, some of the survey
respondents are “working in the trenches” of building the Web. Most of the people in this
latter segment of responders came to the survey by invitation because they are on the
email list of the Pew Internet & American Life Project or are otherwise known to the
Project. They are not necessarily opinion leaders for their industries or well-known
futurists, but it is striking how much their views were distributed in ways that paralleled
those who are celebrated in the technology field.
In all, 618 additional respondents participated in this survey from these quarters. Thus,
the expert results are reported as the product of 578 responses and the lines listing “all
responses” include these additional 618 participants.
This report presents the views of respondents in two ways. First, we cite the aggregate
views of those who responded to our survey. Second, we have quoted many of their
opinions and predictions in the body of this report, and even more of their views are
available on the Elon University-Pew Internet & American Life Project Web site:
http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org/. Scores more responses to each of the scenarios
are cited on specific web pages devoted to each scenarios. Those urls are given in the
chapters devoted to the scenarios.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: Themes Many Respondents Struck in
Their Answers
Here are some of the major themes that run through respondents’ answers:
The mobile phone will be the dominant connection tool:More than three-
quarters of the expert respondents (77%) agreed with a scenario that posited that the
mobile computing device—with more-significant computing power in 2020—will be the
primary Internet communications platform for a majority of people across the world.
They agreed that connection will generally be offered under a set of universal standards
internationally, though many registered doubts about corporations’ and regulators’
willingnesstomakeithappen.
Heightened social tolerance may not be a Web 2.0 result:Respondents were
asked if people will be more tolerant in 2020 than they are today. Some 56% of the
expert respondents disagreed with a scenario positing that social tolerance will advance
significantly by then, saying communication networks also expand the potential for
hate, bigotry, and terrorism. Some 32% predicted tolerance will grow. A number of the
survey participants indicated that the divide between the tolerant and intolerant could
possibly be deepened because of information-sharing tactics people use on the Internet.
Air-typing, touch interfaces, and talking to devices will become common: A
notable majority of the respondents (64%) favored the idea that by 2020 user interfaces
will offer advanced talk, touch, and typing options, and some added a fourth “T”—think.
Those who chose to elaborate in extended responses disagreed on which of the four will
make the most progress by 2020. There was a fairly even yes-no split on the likely
success of voice-recognition or significant wireless keyboard advances and mostly
positive support of the advance of interfaces involving touch and gestures—this was
highly influenced by the introduction of the iPhone and various multitouch surface
computing platforms in 2007 and 2008. A number of respondents projected the
possibility of a thought-based interface—neural networks offering mind-controlled
human-computer interaction. Many expressed concerns over rude, overt public displays
by people using ICTs (“yakking away on their phones about their latest foot fungus”)
and emphasized the desire for people to keep private communications private in future
digital interfaces.
IP law and copyright will remain unsettled:Three out of five respondents (60%)
disagreed with the idea that legislatures, courts, the technology industry, and media
companies will exercise effective content control by 2020. They said “cracking”
technology will stay ahead of technology to control intellectual property (IP) or policy
regulating IP. And they predicted that regulators will not be able to come to a global
agreement about intellectual property. Many respondents suggested that new economic
models will have to be implemented, with an assumption that much that was once
classified as paid content will have to be offered free or in exchange for attention or
some other unit of value. Nearly a third of the survey respondents (31%) agreed that IP
regulation will be successful by 2020; they said more content will be privatized, some
adding that this control might be exercised at the hardware level, through Internet-
access devices such as smartphones.
The division between personal and professional time will disappear:A
majority of expert respondents (56%) agreed with the statement that in 2020 “few lines
(will) divide professional from personal time, and that’s OK.” While some people are
hopeful about a hyperconnected future with more freedom, flexibility, and life
enhancements, others express fears that mobility and ubiquity of networked computing
devices will be harmful for most people by adding to stress and challenging family life
and social life.
Network engineering research will build on the status quo—there isn’t likely
to be a “next-gen ”Internet:Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) said they
think the original Internet architecture will still be in place in 2020 even as it is
continually being refined. They did not believe the current Internet will be replaced by a
completely new “next-generation”system between now and 2020. Those who wrote
extended elaborations to their answers projected the expectation that IPv6 and the
Semantic Web will be vital elements in the continuing development of the Internet over
the next decade. Among other predictions: there will be more “walled gardens,”
separated Internet spaces, created by governments and corporations to maintain
network control; governments and corporations will leverage security fears to retain
power over individuals; crime, piracy, terror, and other negatives will always be
common elements in an open system.
Transparency may or may not make the world a better place:Respondents
were split evenly on whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater
transparency of people and institutions afforded by the Internet: 45% of expert
respondents agreed that transparency of organizations and individuals will heighten
individual integrity and forgiveness and 44% disagreed. The comments about this
prediction were varied: Some argued that transparency is an unstoppable force that has
positives and negatives; it might somehow influence people to live lives in which
integrity and forgiveness are more likely. Others posited that transparency won’t have
any positive influence, in fact it makes everyone vulnerable, and bad things will happen
because of it. Still others argued that the concept of “privacy” is changing, it is becoming
scarce, and it will be protected and threatened by emerging innovations; tracking and
databasing will be ubiquitous; reputation maintenance and repair will be required; some
people will have multiple digital identities; some people will withdraw.
Augmented reality and interactive virtual spaces might see more action:More
than half of respondents (55%) agreed with the notion that many lives will be touched in
2020 by virtual worlds, mirror worlds, and augmented reality. Yet 45% either disagreed
or didn’t anwer this question, so the sentiment isn’t overwhelming. People’s definitions
for the terms “augmented reality”and “virtual reality” are quite varied; smartphones
and GPS help people augment reality to a certain extent today and are expected to do
more soon; many think today’s social networks qualify as a form of virtual reality while
others define it in terms of Second Life or something even more immersive. Some noted
that by 2020 augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will have reached the
point of blurring with reality. Many indicated this will enhance the world, providing new
opportunities for conferencing, teaching, and 3-D modeling, and some added that
breakthroughs to come may bring significant change, including fusion with other
developments, such as genetic engineering. Some respondents expressed fear of the
negatives of AR and VR, including: new extensions of the digital divide; an increase in
violence and obesity; and the potential for addiction or overload. There is agreement that
user interfaces have to be much more intuitive for AR and VR to become more
universally adopted.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: A Sample of Revealing Quotations and
Predictions Selected from the Thousands Submitted
The evolution of the device for connection:“People in Africa turned paid
telephone minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency…There are already reasons
why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use cheap
telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways to use
connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”—Howard
Rheingold, Internet sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart
Mobs”
“By 2020, the network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world…Billions of people will have joined
the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.” —Susan Crawford,
founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) board member
“Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor populations, and the next five
years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal, and federal governments,
handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will win.”—danah boyd,
Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
“Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era—like transistor radios are
today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard
communications chip on many devices. We'll probably carry some kind of screen-based
reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to
communicate verbally, we'll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.” —Josh
Quittner, executive editor of Fortune Magazine and longtime technology journalist
and editor
The evolution of social tolerance: “Not in mankind’s nature. The first global satellite
link-up was 1967, BBC's Our World: the Beatles ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and we still have
war, genocide, and assassination (Lennon's poignantly).”—Adam Peake, policy
analyst for the Center for Global Communications and participant in the World
Summit on the Information Society
“Polarization will continue and the people on the extremes will be less tolerant of those
opposite them. At the same time, within homogenous groups (religious, political, social,
financial, etc.) greater tolerance will likely occur.”—Don Heath, Internet pioneer and
former president and CEO of the Internet Society
“Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or
kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, since one's real-world
surroundings will not have the homogeneity of one's online clan.”—Jim Horning,
chief scientist for information security at SPARTA Inc. and a founder of InterTrust’s
Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory
The evolution of intellectual property law and copyright: “Many people want IP
protection, but everyone wants to steal. Regardless of the legal mechanisms so far—e.g.,
automatic damages, compulsory copyrights—many people would prefer the illegal route,
perhaps because it runs up their adrenaline.” —Michael Botein, founding director of
the Media Law Center at New York University Law School
“Copying data is the natural state of computers; we would have to try to compromise
them too much to support this regime.”—Brad Templeton, chairman of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
“While I applaud the efforts of DRM [digital rights management] opponents, I am
discouraged by the progress DRM seems to continue to make in hardware as much as in
software. Having purchased an iPhone, I was delighted when Apple updated its software
to allow custom ringtones, only to discover that I needed to pay for a ringtone via the
iTunes Music Store even though the ringtone I wanted to use was one in which I own
the copyright!”—Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers
and editor of New Media & Society
“There will be cross-linking of content provider giants and Internet service provider
giants and that they will find ways to milk every last ‘currency unit’ out of the unwitting
and defenseless consumer. Governments will be strongly influenced by the business
conglomerates and will not do much to protect consumers. (Just think of the outrageous
rates charged by cable and phone company TV providers and wireless phone providers
today—it will only get worse.)” —Steve Goldstein, ICANN board member formerly of
the US National Science Foundation
“Copyright is a dead duck in a digital world. The old regime based its power on high
distribution costs. Those costs are going to zero. Bye-bye DRM.” —Dan Lynch, founder
of CyberCash and Interop Company, now a board member of the Santa Fe Institute
“You cannot stop a tide with a spoon. Cracking technology will always be several steps
ahead of DRM and content will be redistributed on anonymous networks.”—Giulio
Prisco, chief executive of Metafuturing Second Life, formerly of CERN
The evolution of privacy and transparency: “We will enter a time of mutually
assured humiliation; we all live in glass houses. That will be positive for tolerance and
understanding, but—even more important—I believe that young people will not lose
touch with their friends as my generation did and that realization of permanence in
relationships could—or should—lead to more care in those relationships.” —Jeff Jarvis,
top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of New York
Graduate School of Journalism
“Gen Y has a new notion of privacy. The old ‘never trust anyone over 30’ will turn into
‘never trust anyone who doesn't have embarrassing stuff online.’”—Jerry Michalski,
founder and president of Sociate
“Viciousness will prevail over civility, fraternity, and tolerance as a general rule, despite
the build-up of pockets or groups ruled by these virtues. Software will be unable to stop
deeper and more hard-hitting intrusions into intimacy and privacy, and these will
continue to happen.” —Alejandro Pisanty, ICANN and Internet Society leader and
directorofcomputerservicesatUniversidadNacionalAutónomadeMéxico
“By 2020, the Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by
businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have
happily traded their privacy—consciously or unconsciously—for consumer benefits such
as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and
manipulation will have largely disappeared.”—Nicholas Carr, author of the Rough
Type blog and “The Big Switch”
“The volume and ubiquity of personal information, clicktrails, personal media, etc., will
desensitize us. A super-abundance of transparency will lose its ability to shock. Maybe
there will be software-driven real-time reputation insurance service, offering monitoring
and repair to dinged reputations. This could be as ordinary as auto insurance or
mortgage insurance is today, and as automated as the nightly backups performed by
most online businesses. I don't agree that this will make us any kinder.”—Havi
Hoffman, Yahoo Developer Network
The evolution of augmented and virtual reality: “Mirror worlds are multi-
dimensional experiences with profound implications for education, medicine, and social
interaction. ‘Real life’ as we know it is over. Soon when anyone mentions reality, the
first question we will ask is, ‘Which reality are you referring to?’ We will choose our
realities, and in each reality there will be truths germane to that reality, and so we will
choose our truth as well.”—Barry Chudakov, principal with the Chudakov Company
“We in the present don't think of ourselves as living in ‘cyberspace,’ even though people
of a decade previous would have termed it such. Of the various forms of the metaverse,
however, the majority of activity will take place in blended or augmented-reality spaces,
not in distinct virtual/alternative world spaces.”—Jamais Cascio, a co-author of the
“Metaverse Roadmap Overview,”a report on the potential futures of VR, AR, and the
geoWeb
“Augmented reality will become nearly the de facto interface standard by 2020, with 2-
D and 3-D overlays over real-world objects providing rich information, context,
entertainment, and (yes) promotions and offers. At the same time, a metaverse
(especially when presented in an augmented-reality-overlay environment) provides
compelling ways to facilitate teamwork and collaboration while reducing overall travel
budgets.” —Jason Stoddard, managing partner at Centric/Agency of Change
“The virtual world removes all barriers of human limitation; you can be anyone you
want to be instead of being bound by physical and material limitations. That allows
people to be who they naturally are, freed of any perception they may have of
themselves based on their ‘real life’—it is the power of removing the barriers of your own
perception of yourself.” —Tze-Meng Tan, Multimedia Development Corporation in
Malaysia, a director at OpenSOS
“We are in the last generation of human fighter pilots. Already, drones in Iraq are
piloted in San Diego. What will improve is the ability of the artificial spaces to control
physical reality, to expand our reach more effectively in many aspects of the physical
universe.” —Dick Davies, partner at Project Management and Control Inc. and a past
president of the Association of Information Technology Professionals
“In a reaction to the virtual world, entrepreneurs will establish ‘virt-free’ zones where
reality is not augmented. In various heavily connected areas, there will be sanctuaries
(hotels, restaurants, bars, summer camps, vehicles) which people may visit to separate
themselves from adhesion or other realities.”—C.R. Roberts, Vancouver-based
technology reporter
“For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend, certain pundits can seriously
propose that the wave of the future is chatting using electronic hand-puppets. Flight
Simulator is not an aircraft, and typing at a screen is not an augmentation of the real
world.” —Seth Finkelstein, author of the Infothought blog, writer and programmer
“A map is not the territory and a letter is not the person. We have always had multiple
facades, for most, most common, work, home and play. The extension into more
immersive ‘unreal’ worlds is going to happen.”—Hamish MacEwen, consultant at
Open ICT in New Zealand
The evolution of user interfaces: “There will be ‘subvocal’ inputs that detect ‘almost
speech’ thatyouwill,butdonotactuallyvoice.Smallsensorsonteethwillalsoletyou
tap commands. Your eyeballs will track desires, sensed by your eyeglasses. And so on.”
—David Brin, futurist and author of “The Transparent Society”
“WiFi- and WiMax-enabled badges with voice recognition will act as personal
assistants—allowing you to talk with someone by saying their name, to post a voice blog,
or access directions from the Internet for the task at hand.”—Jim Kohlenberger,
director of Voice on the Net Coalition; senior fellow at the Benton Foundation
“I could see a whole physical way of communicating with our technology tools that
could be part of our health and exercise. A day answering e-mails could be a full-on
physical workout ; )….”—Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards
“We will see the display interface device separated from the input device over the next 12
years. Display devices will be everywhere, and you will be able to use them with your
input device. The input device might be virtual, as in the case of the iPhone or a
holographic keyboard, or they might resemble the keyboards and touchpads that people
are using today.”—Ross Rader, a director with Tucows who is active in the ICANN
Registrars constituency
“While air-typing and haptic gestures are widespread and ubiquitous, the arrival of
embedded optical displays, thought-transcription, eye-movement tracking, and
predictive-behavior modeling will fundamentally alter the human-computer interaction
model.” —Sean Steele, CEO and senior security consultant for infoLock Technologies
The evolution of network architecture: “The control-oriented telco (ITU) next-
generation network will not fully evolve, the importance of openness and enabling
innovation from the edges will prevail; i.e. Internet will essentially retain the key
characteristics we enjoy today, mainly because there's more money to be made.”—
Adam Peake, executive research fellow and telecommunications policy analyst at the
Center for Global Communications
“Some parts of the Internet may fragment, as nations pursue their own technology
trajectories. The Internet is so vastly complex, incremental upgrades seem to be the only
way to get anything done…Places like China may make big leaps and bounds because
there is less legacy.” —Anthony Townsend, research director, The Institute for the
Future
“Current Internet standards bodies and core Internet protocols are ossifying to such an
extent that security and performance requirements for next-generation applications will
require a totally new base platform. If current Internet base protocols survive, it will be
as a substrata paved over by new-generation smarter ways of connecting.”—Ian
Peter, Ian Peter and Associates and the Internet Mark 2 Project
“The Web must still be a messy, fabulous, exciting, dangerous, poetic, depressing, elating
place...akin to life; which is not a bad thing.”—Luis Santos, Universidade do Minho-
Braga, Portugal
“When have we ever stopped crime? If it is a choice between having some criminals
around and having a repressive government, I will take the former; they are much
easier to deal with.” —Leonard Witt, associate professor at Kennesaw State University
in Georgia and author of the Webog PJNet.org
“The Internet is not magical; it will be utterly over-managed by commercial concerns,
hobbled with ‘security’ micromanagement, and turned into money-shaped traffic for
business, the rest 90% paid-for content download and the rest of the bandwidth used for
market feedback.”—Tom Jennings, University of California-Irvine, creator of FidoNet
and builder of Wired magazine’s first online site
The evolution of work life and home life activity: “Corporate control of workers’
time—in the guise of work/ family balance—now extends to detailed monitoring of
when people are on and off work. The company town is replaced by ‘company time-
management,’ and it is work time that drives all other time uses. This dystopia
challenges the concept of white-collar work, and unionism is increasingly an issue.”—
Steve Sawyer, associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and
Technology, Penn State University
“The result may be longer, less-efficient working hours and more stressful home life.”—
Victoria Nash, director of graduate studies and policy and research officer, the
Oxford Internet Institute
“It’s already happened, for better or worse. Get over it.”—Anonymous respondent
(Many additional thoughtful and provocative comments appear in the main report.)
This Report Builds on the Online Resource Imagining the
Internet: A History and Forecast
At the invitation of Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project,
Elon University associate professor Janna Quitney Anderson began a research initiative
in the spring semester of 2003 to search for comments and predictions about the future
impact of the Internet during the time when the World Wide Web and browsers
emerged, between 1990 and 1995. The idea was to replicate the fascinating work of
Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective
Technology Assessment. Elon students, faculty, and staff studied government
documents, technology newsletters, conference proceedings, trade newsletters, and the
business press and gathered predictions about the future of the Internet. Eventually,
more than 4,000 early '90s predictions from about 1,000 people were amassed.
The early 1990s predictions are available in a searchable database online at the site
Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast and they are also the basis for a book
by Anderson titled Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives
(2005, Rowman & Littlefield).
The fruits of that work inspired additional research into the past and future of the
Internet, and the Imagining the Internet Web site
(www.imaginingtheInternet.org/) )—now numbering about 6,200 pages—includes
results from the entire series of Future of the Internet surveys, video and audio
interviews showcasing experts' predictions about the next 10 to 50 years, a children's
section, tips for teachers, a “Voices of the People” section on which anyone can post his
or her prediction, and information about the recent history of communications
technology.
We expect the site will continue to serve as a valuable resource for researchers, policy
makers, students, and the general public for decades to come. Further, we encourage
readers of this report to enter their own predictions at the site.
The series of Future of the Internet surveys is also published in book form by Cambria
Press.
Acknowledgements
About the Pew Internet & American Life Project : The Pew Internet Project is an
initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit “fact tank”that provides information
on the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping America and the world. Pew Internet
explores the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, the work place,
schools,healthcare,andcivic/politicallife.TheProjectisnonpartisanandtakesno
position on policy issues. Support for the project is provided by The Pew Charitable
Trusts. The Project’s Web site URL is: http://www.pewinternet.org.
Princeton Survey Research Associates International: PSRAI conducted the
survey that is covered in this report. It is an independent research company specializing
insocialandpolicywork.Thefirmdesigns,conductsandanalyzessurveysworldwide.
Itsexpertisealsoincludesqualitativeresearchandcontentanalysis.Withofficesin
Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., PSRAI serves the needs of clients around
thenationandtheworld.Thefirmcanbereachedat911CommonsWay,Princeton,
N.J. 08540, by telephone at 609-924-9204, by fax at 609-924-7499, or by email at
ResearchNJ@PSRA.com
The Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University’s School of
Communications: TheImaginingtheInternetCenteratElonUniversityholdsa
mirror to humanity’s use of communications technologies, informs policy development,
exposes potential futures, and provides a historic record. It has teamed with the Pew
Internet Project to complete a number of research studies, including the building of
Imagining the Internet (a foresight and history Web site), a survey of stakeholders at
the UN-administrated Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, and an
ethnographic study of a small town, “One Neighborhood, One Week on the Internet,”
all under the direction of Janna Quitney Anderson. For contact regarding Imagining the
Internet, send e-mail to predictions@elon.edu. The university site is:
http://www.elon.edu/.
Introduction
Predictions often inspire lively discussion about the future and they can help
stakeholders prepare to make adjustments to meet the needs associated with
technological change. Those who think about the future are best poised to influence it
and cope with it.
Many futurists, scientists, and long-term thinkers today argue that the acceleration of
technological change over the past decade has greatly increased the importance of
strategic vision. Technology innovations will continue to impact us. The question is
whether this process will reflect thoughtful planning or wash over us like an unstoppable
wave. This survey is aimed at gathering a collection of opinions regarding the
possibilities we all face.
How the Surveys Originated and Have Been Conducted
This research project got its start in mid-2001, when Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew
Internet & American Life Project, approached officials at Elon University with an idea
that the Project and the University might replicate the work of Ithiel de Sola Pool in his
1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment. Pool
and his students had looked at primary official documents, technology community
publications, speeches given by government and business leaders, and marketing
literature at the turn of the 20
th
Century to examine the kind of impacts experts thought
the telephone would have on Americans’ social and economic lives.
The idea was to apply Pool’s research method to the Internet, particularly focused on the
period between 1990 and 1995 when the World Wide Web and Web browsers emerged.
In the spring semester of 2003, Janna Quitney Anderson, a professor of journalism and
communications at Elon, led a research initiative that set out to accomplish this goal.
More than 4,200 predictive statements made in the early 1990s by 1,000 people were
logged and categorized. The result is available on the site Imagining the Internet: A
History and Forecast (www.imaginingtheInternet.org/).
We reasoned that if experts and technologists had been so thoughtful in the early 1990s
about what was going to happen, they would likely be equally as insightful looking
ahead from this moment. In 2004, we asked most of those whose predictions were in
the 1990-1995 database and additional experts to assess a number of predictions about
the coming decade, and their answers were codified in an initial futures survey: “The
Future of the
Internet” (http://www.pewInternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf).
Several years later, we repeated the process with some new predictions and an expanded
base of experts. In late 2005 and the first quarter of 2006, the Pew Internet Project
issued an e-mail invitation to a select group of technology thinkers, stakeholders, and
social analysts, asking them to complete the second scenario-based quantitative and
qualitative survey, “The Future of the Internet II.”The official analysis of the results of
that survey is available here:
http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet_2006.pdf
And we report here the results of a third survey that was conducted online between
December 26, 2007 and March 3, 2008. Some 1,196 people were generous enough to
take the time to respond to this Future of the Internet III online survey.
Nearly half of the Future III respondents are Internet pioneers who were online before
1993.Roughlyonefifthoftherespondentssaytheyliveandworkinanationoutsideof
North America.
The respondents' answers represent their personal views and in no way reflect the
perspectives of their employers. Many survey participants were hand-picked due to their
positions as stakeholders in the development of the Internet or they were reached
through the leadership listservs of top technology organizations including the Internet
Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the World Wide Web Consortium, the
United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, Internet2, Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, International Telecommunication Union, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, Association of Internet Researchers, and the American Sociological
Association's Information Technology Research section.
About the Survey Participants
Many top Internet leaders, activists, and commentators participated in the survey,
including Clay Shirky, Fred Baker, David Brin, Susan Crawford, Brad Templeton,
Howard Rheingold, Jim Kohlenberger, Josh Quittner, Seth Finkelstein, danah boyd, Hal
Varian, Jeff Jarvis, Anthony Rutkowski, Michael Botein, Steve Jones, Richard Bartle,
Alejandro Pisanty, Tom Vest, Milton Mueller, Bernardo Huberman, Jonne Soininen,
Don Heath, Doug Brent, Anthony Townsend, Steve Goldstein, Adam Peake, Basil
Crozier, Craig Partridge, Sebastien Bachollet, Geert Lovink, James Jay Horning, Dan
Lynch, Fernando Barrio, Roberto Gaetano, Christian Huitema, Susan Mernit, Jamais
Cascio, Norbert Klein, Tapio Varis, Martin Boyle, Ian Peter, Todd Spraggins, Catherine
Fitzpatrick, Tom Keller, Charles Kenny, Robert Cannon, Hakikur Rahman, Larry
Lannom, David Farrar, John Levine, Cliff Figallo, Sebastien Ricciardi, Lea Shaver, Seth
Gordon, Jim McConnaughey, Neil Mcintosh, Charles Ess, Alan Levin, David W. Maher,
Jonathan Dube, Thomas Vander Wal, Adrian Schofield, Clifford Lynch, Jerry Michalski,
Paul Miller, and David Moschella, to name a few.
A sampling of the workplaces of respondents includes the Internet Society, World Bank,
Booz Allen Hamilton, AT&T Labs, VeriSign, Cisco, Google, BBN Technologies, Fing,
Yahoo Japan, France Telecom, the International Telecommunication Union, Alcatel-
Lucent, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GLOCOM, AfriNIC, Electronic Privacy
Information Center, APNIC, Universiteit Maastricht, Amnesty International, BBC, PBS,
IBM, Microsoft, Forrester Research, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet
and Society, Open Society Institute, Open the Future, Yahoo, First Semantic, CNET,
Microsoft, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, IDG, FCC, Institute for the
Future, 1&1 Internet AG, Moody’s, HP Laboratories, Amazon.com, Gannett,
Lexis/Nexis, Tucows, InternetNZ, ICANN, Oxford Internet Institute, Institute of the
Information Society—Russia, The Center on Media and Society, Online News
Association, Nokia, the Association for the Advancement of Information Technology,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Network Cultures, Nortel,
Disney, DiploFoundation, Information Technology Industry Council, J-Lab,
Information Society Project at Yale University, Santa Fe Institute, the London School of
Economics, the University of California-Berkeley, NASA, the Singapore Internet
Research Center, Princeton University, the federal government of Canada, several policy
divisions of the US government, and many dozens of others.
Participants described their primary area of Internet interest as “research
scientist”(12%); “technology developer or administrator” (11%); “entrepreneur or
business leader” (10%); “author, editor, or journalist” (9%); “futurist or
consultant” (7%); “advocate, voice of the people, or activist user”(5%); “legislator or
politician” (1%); or “pioneer or originator”(2%); however many participants chose
“other”(24%) for this survey question or did not respond (18%).
The Scenarios Were Built to Elicit Deeply Felt Opinions
The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University do not advocate policy
outcomes related to the Internet. The predictive scenarios included in the survey were
structured to provoke reaction, not because we think any of them will necessarily come
tofruition.
The scenarios for this survey and survey analysis were crafted after a study of the
responses from our previous surveys and of the predictions made in reports by the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations
Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, the Metaverse Roadmap, The
Institute for the Future, Global Business Network, and other foresight organizations and
individual foresight leaders.
The 2020 scenarios were constructed to elicit engaged responses to many-layered issues,
so it was sometimes the case that survey participants would agree with most or part of a
scenario, but not all of it. In addition to trying to pack several ideas into each scenario,
we tried to balance them with “good,”“bad,” and “neutral” outcomes. The history of
technology is full of evidence that tech adoption brings both positive and negative
results.
After each portion of the survey we invited participants to write narrative responses
providing an explanation for their answers. Not surprisingly, the most interesting
product of the survey is the ensuing collection of open-ended discussion, predictions, and
analyses written by the participants in response to our material. We have included many
of those responses in this report. A great number of additional responses are included on
the Imagining the Internet site, available at: http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org.
Since participants’ answers evolved in both tone and content as they went through the
questionnaire, the findings in this report are presented in the same order as the original
survey. The respondents were asked to “sign” each written response they were willing to
have credited to them in the Elon-Pew database and in this report. The quotations in the
report are attributed to those who agreed to have their words quoted. When a quote is
not attributed to someone, it is because that person chose not to sign his or her written
answer.
To make this report more readable and include many voices, some of the lengthier
written elaborations have been edited.
Prediction and Reactions
PREDICTION:The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most
people in the world. In 2020, while "one laptop per child" and other initiatives to
bring networked digital communications to everyone are successful on many levels, the
mobile phone—now with significant computing power—is the primary Internet
connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world, providing
information in a portable, well-connected form at a relatively low price. Telephony is
offered under a set of universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, making for reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world
to another. At this point, the "bottom" three-quarters of the world's population account
for at least 50% of all people with Internet access—up from 30% in 2005.
Expert Respondents’Reactions (N=578)
MostlyAgree77%
MostlyDisagree22%
DidNotRespond*%
All Respondents’Reactions (N=1,196)
MostlyAgree81%
MostlyDisagree19%
DidNotRespond*%
Note:Sinceresultsarebasedonanonrandomsample,amarginoferrorcannotbe
computed. The “prediction” was composed to elicit responses and is not a formal
forecast.
Respondents were presented with a brief set of information outlining the status quo of
the issue 2007 that prefaced this scenario. It read:
According to the UN/ITU World Information Society Report 2007, there has been
some progress in improving digital inclusion: In 1997 the nearly three-quarters of the
world's population who lived in low-income and lower-middle-income economies
accounted for just 5% of the world's population with Internet access
2
By 2005, they
accounted for just over 30%. A number of commercial and non-profit agencies are
combining forces to bring inexpensive laptop computers to remote regions of the world
to connect under-served populations. In addition, by the end of 2008 more than half the
world's population is expected to have access to a mobile phone.
Overview of Respondents' Reactions
A significant majority of expert respondents agreed with this predicted
future. The consensus is that mobile devices will continue to grow in
importance because people need to be connected, wherever they are. Cost-
effectiveness and access are also factors driving the use of phones as
connection devices. Many respondents believe that mobile devices of the
future will have significant computing power. The experts fear that limits set
by governments and/or corporations seeking control might impede positive
evolution and diffusion of these devices; according to respondents, this
scenario’s predicted benefit of “effortless”connectivity is dependent on
corporate and government leaders’willingness to serve the public good.
The overwhelming majority of respondents agreeing with this scenario took note of the
current boom in cell phone and smartphone use and imagined its extension. “By 2020
we should see several billion cell phones shipping per year, most of which will be
Internet-capable; this will probably dwarf the volumes of other Internet-capable
devices, such as PCs,”wrote one anonymous participant.
There are 6.6 billion people in the world, and the UN estimates that 1.2 billion have
access to and use the Internet (2007 figures). Wireless Intelligence, a market database,
reports that it took 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell, just four years for
the second billion, and two years for the third billion.
3
The firm projects there will be 4
billion cell phones in the world by the end of 2008; about 11 percent were Internet-
enabled in 2007, and it is expected that could rise to 15 percent by the end of 2008. (It is
important to remember that some people own more than one mobile phone—in 2007 it
was estimated that 700 million people owned more than one—so 3 billion phones does
not equate to 3 billion people who have and use mobile phones.)
Several survey participants noted in their written elaborations to the survey question
that connectedness serves humanity in so many ways that even people who are
struggling to make a dollar a day in the world’s least-developed nations find the
economics of mobile telephony to be manageable and sometimes even vital to their lives.
“Communication is a basic human need,”responded Howard Rheingold, Internet
sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart Mobs.”“People who are
trying to scrape by have immediate need for connection to information about local labor
and commodities markets. Public-health and disaster-relief information can be an SMS
[short-message-service—or “text”] message away. People in Africa turned paid telephone
minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency, because they had the need to transfer
small amounts of money. Billions of squatters might live in slums but still ingeniously
and often illegally deliver the construction and utilities services they need. There are
already reasons why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use
cheap telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways
to use connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”
Lutfor Rahman, of the Association for Advancement of Information Technology in
Bangladesh, said mobile communication is world-changing. “Before introducing the
mobile phone in remote areas of Bangladesh, the exchange of information was through
physically meeting,”he wrote. “That wasted much time, and sometimes it became
impossible in short time because of lack of communication facilities.”
Gbenga Sesan, a Nigerian and consultant on the use of the Internet for development
for Paradigm Initiative, has written extensively about the use of mobile
communications. “With the rise in the number of mobile phone users across the
continent, it is only wise to start planning that the future will be driven through mobile
phones—governance, businesses, networking, leisure, and more,” he commented. “The
story will be the same across the world. Regardless of technology choice (GSM, CDMA,
etc), mobile telephones will form the core of human interaction and livelihood. And
when you consider the fact that some mobile phones were competing with computers in
2007, you can only wonder if owning a PC will matter by December 31, 2019.”
It Will Be More Computer Than Phone
Many who responded with a further elaboration on this scenario said while the device
we will be using will be small and possibly resemble today’s wireless phones in its shape,
it will actually be a multitasking computer, used less for voice communication than for
other tasks. “The computing power that will be able to fit into a phone-size device in 13
years will be incredible,” wroteananonymousrespondent.
“By 2020 a device that more closely resembles today's mobile phone rather than today's
computer will certainly be the primary connection tool,”said Paul Miller, a technology
evangelist for Talis, a UK-based Web company, and blogger for ZDNet. “Whether it is at
all 'phone'-like, or even used very often for voice-only communication is more open to
question, though.”
Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member, agreed. “By 2020 we'll stop
talking about ‘phones,’ with any luck,” shewrote.“Nor will we be talking about
‘telephony.’ Those terms, I hope, will be dead. These devices will just be handsets of
which we'll be very fond. They'll have screens that are just large enough for us to feel
immersedinthevisualsprovided.Whatwillwebedoing?UsingtheInternet.
Interacting, doing work, talking, participating, uploading to the cloud. By 2020, the
network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been (with any luck) disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world, but they won't be optimized on
billing (as telephone and wireless connections are now). Billions of people will have
joined the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.”
Rich Miller, CEO for Replicate Technologies and an Internet pioneer with ARPANET,
wrote, “The ‘phone’ as such is more likely to be a personal media server/media gateway.
This same personal media server—size not much different than today's mobile phone—
permits varieties of ‘terminal’ devices, including display, voice input/output, etc. Audio
and video interfaces are more likely to be separate devices (like today's Bluetooth
headset, but with more user interface controls).”
Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate dean
at the University of Illinois-Chicago, projected, “By 2020 I don't think it will be so easy
to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop. These will blend into a general
‘mobile computing’ category of device (for which we probably don't yet have a name).”
Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of Voice on the Net Coalition, a senior fellow for
the Benton Foundation and former White House policy advisor, commented, “The
mobile ‘phone’ will largely be eclipsed and replaced by the open network device—an open
mobile computing device also capable of voice. But the assumption is correct that these
mobile devices will be more significant and ubiquitous than wired devices. In terms of
inclusion, there are already developing countries that have set up open and competitive
wireless markets to foster these innovations and reap their benefits. But other developing
countries that still have government-run telecom sectors or that haven’t enabled
wireless competition could be further left behind.”
And Jeff Jarvis, top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of
New York Graduate School of Journalism, and many other respondents said we should
not concentrate on the appliance, but the connectivity. “We will have many devices that
are constantly connected; in that sense, it's connectivity that will be mobile and the
devices will merely plug in,”Jarvis explained. “This will lead to a world that is not only
connected but also live and immediate. Witnesses will share news as they witness it. We
can get answers to any question anytime. We can stay in constant touch with the people
we know, following their lives as we follow RSS and Twitter feeds.”
Respondents Say Mobility Is Key to Sharing Information
Everywhere in the World
In 2007 the bottom three-quarters of the world’s population included about 30 percent
of the people who have Internet access. The 2020 scenario proposed to survey
respondents that this number will rise to 50 percent. Participants agreed that mobile
communications devices—most of them not yet Internet-connected—have made an
amazing impact already and will continue to bridge the digital divide and promote
digital inclusion. Geert Lovink wrote, “We now still look at the world from a 'digital
divide' perspective, but that will soon be of little use. The massive use by the 'emerging'
underclasses of the 'Global South' of mobile phones should be interpreted as a necessity
of the labour force to gain mobility in order to increase their output.”
Charles Kenny, senior economist for the World Bank, the international aid agency,
commented, “The mobile phone will be used for an increasing range of services such as
m-banking in developing countries, but it will also remain key as a tool for voice
communication. For around a quarter of the world's population still officially illiterate
(and many more functionally illiterate), voice telephony will remain the primary means
of communicating over distance.”An anonymous survey participant added, “Voice
communication is the most common method used by humans to communicate, and
devices with voice capabilities will be key.”
Jonne Soininen, Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Society leader and
manager of Internet affairs for Nokia Siemens Network, added, “In many places having
fixed infrastructure is not possible either physically or economically, thus, making
mobile systems the viable option for Internet access.”
Active Internet Society and ICANN participant Cheryl Langdon-Orr said she takes
issue with the figure of 50 percent of the world being connected, and she hopes for more.
“Mobile device connectivity to the Internet is indeed a cost-effective e-future vision for
many,”she wrote, “but in my utopia where the Internet Society states ‘The Internet is
for Everyone’ we would be looking at much more than 50 percent of people being online
by 2020.”
And Sudip Aryal, president of the Nepal Rural Information Technology Development
Society, wrote, “to meet this target of 50 percent or even more than that, each and every
country should make ICT as a national-priority issue. Just like the awareness of
HIV/AIDS and use of condoms, the national and international bodies must launch a
program to aware about the ‘importance of Internet in one's life’ to the grass root
communities.”
Michael Botein, a telecommunications law expert at New York University and
consultant to the Federal Communications Commission, said improved, affordable
mobile technology could help pave the way to a friendlier world. “It is difficult to foresee
a future short of a technological breakthrough in which mobile technology will have
enough bandwidth to provide data services, real-time video, and the like,” he wrote. “On
a positive note, however, cellular will allow the beginnings of universal service in most
parts of the world—as already in Latin America and Africa—and thus may help break
down long-held hostilities.”
Several respondents, including Neil McIntosh, director of editorial development for the
top news site guardian.co.uk, based in London, said, “a greater and more fundamental
problem, however, may be poor literacy and continued widespread poverty, which
technology by itself can't solve.”
Some Experts Express Doubts About Interoperability and Open
Networks
Some of those who chose to mostly agree with this scenario did so while expressing
reservations about parts of it. A number of them suggested that governments and/or
corporations concerned with retaining or gaining more control over use of the Internet
might limit some types of connection in certain parts of the world, and others projected
a potential lack of universal standards and protocols in a world of changing technology.
Michael Zimmer, resident fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School, wrote, “I agree almost entirely with this prediction…My only hesitation is
whether there will be universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, since US mobile providers have shown little interest in providing full
interoperability and open devices to take full advantage of new mobile services.”
Social media research expert danah boyd of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for
Internet and Society wrote, “Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor
populations, and the next five years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal,
and federal governments, handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will
win. If the carriers continue to own the market, network access through mass adoption
of the mobile will be far slower than if governments would begin blanketing their land
with WiFi (or network access on other spectrum channels) as a public-good
infrastructure project and handset makers would begin making cheap accessible
handsets for such access. The latter dynamic would introduce network access (and
telephony) to many more people, much to the chagrin of carriers.”
Ross Rader, a member of the ICANN Registrars Constituency and executive for
Tucows Inc., wrote, “This scenario may likely happen over the next few years, not the
next 12. The only real obstacle to this level of adoption and social integration lies with
the willingness of the telecommunications industry to resist the temptation to segregate
and verticalize its offerings. In other words, the communications network market must
be made much more competitive than it is today. Handsets need to be freed from
applications, and applications need to be freed from networks. Only truly open networks
will drive the sort of adoption envisaged in this scenario. We are starting to see the first
glimpses of this today with Google's Android, Verizon's open network initiative, the
power of the iPhone, but much work in all of these, and other, areas remains to be done
before the networks, applications, and handsets markets are fully competitive.”
A few respondents said they believe corporate leaders are interested in the positive
diffusion of affordable technology tools to less-developed areas of the world. Peter Kim,
a senior analyst for Forrester Research, commented, “Handset manufacturers have
already started to focus on countries with lower GDP. Continued efficiency in
production and increase in computing power, along with the natural desire of humans
to connect will help make this scenario a reality.”
Many survey participants expressed concerns about pricing. One anonymous respondent
wrote, “The success of the mobile phone as a universal-access device is contingent on
adoption of flat-rate style charges, as is normal for Internet applications, rather than
high per-minute charges which currently dominate mobile-pricing structures.”
Bandwidth, Screen Size, Poor User-Interface Are Among the
Other Potential Limits Cited
Some respondents who mostly disagreed with the scenario wrote that delivery will
continue to be more efficient through earth-based connections. “Wireless doesn't ever
provide as much bandwidth as wired connections; wireless will always be slower, thus
second-best,” wrote one anonymous respondent. “Primary ‘work’ will still be done over
wired connections, with wireless filling in the gaps and supporting mobile applications.”
Another wrote, “Will there be enough wireless infrastructure for truly complex Internet
applications on a phone?”
Another more multi-layered response in regard to limitations of the scenario came from
an anonymous survey participant: “Wireless technologies have a number of inherent
problems including but not limited to interference and capacity. The simple log trend of
traffic and data patterns precludes wireless. While some form of ubiquitous wireless
access will be available most places, fibre will be more important than ever. Phones also
have UI restrictions, any conception of phones without other peripheral interfacing
technologies such as HUDS eye movement/brain interfaces simply will not meet the
needs.”
“Unless the phone—which will really be seen as the one device that we carry around that
includes voice, text, still/video camera, GPS, AV player, computer, voice-to -digital-
information interface, Internet, television, bank account, etc.—has the capacity to
project at least a 15" display, it will be too small to use as the primary connection tool for
the majority of world-wide users,” wrote Peter Eckart, director of health information
technology for the Illinois Public Health Institute. “The majority of us will carry our
digital presence indicator with us from place to place on that device, but the bandwidth
and interface will be provided by our home or work or coffee shop, with the device there
to maintain digital identity. I do agree that the mobile device will be the primary or only
connection for poorer folks. People's wealth or income will be reflected in the size of their
display, the number of Ds (2 or 3), their connection speed, amount of digital storage,
and most importantly, their level of access to information stores.”
Adrian Schofield, a leader in the World Information Technology and Services Alliance
and manager of applied research at the Johannesburg Center for Software Engineering
in South Africa, wrote that people will use multiple devices. “There are likely to be two
distinct types of hand-held device—the mobile phone and the mobile PDA,”he
commented. “The phone will be the instrument that enables the less economically
empowered people to communicate by voice and text and to perform basic financial and
government transactions. The PDA will offer the full range of communications and
computing facilities, including TV, GPS, and video camera. Using improved solar
technology, battery life will be significantly extended and offices, hotels, and other
venues will provide free plasma screens for those who wish to access a larger image than
the one offered on the device.”
Well-known economist and technology expert Hal Varian, of Google and the
University of California-Berkeley, responded, “The big problem with the cell phone is the
UI [user interface], particularly on the data side. We are waiting for a breakthrough.”
Fabrice Florin, the executive director of NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news
network, wrote, “While I agree that the mobile phone will play a growing role as a low-
cost computing platform, I disagree that it will be the 'primary Internet connection and
the only one for a majority of the people across the world.' Other computing platforms
and connectivity options will become widely available by then, such as cheap computers
(or wall-based computing environments) with landline or comparable broadband
connections. I predict that these faster connections and larger-screen platforms will be
more affordable and effective from a productivity standpoint than small and slow
mobile platforms.”
One Laptop Per Child Is Seen as Limited
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a large-scale US-based project to provide affordable,
practical computing and Internet capabilities to people in underserved communities
around the world. The effort has brought together people from the technology industry,
non-governmental organizations, and governments in the process of designing,
manufacturing, and distributing these tools.
The Future of the Internet III survey was distributed at about the same time the OLPC
computers became available; they have come under some criticism in the popular
media, and they met some criticism from survey participants. Scott Smith wrote,
“OLPC-style efforts are already beginning to fragment at the start of 2008 even before
the actual OLPC initiative gains any real ground.”Seth Finkelstein wrote, “One
Laptop Per Child is a classic ‘ugly American’-style project.”
Charles Ess, an online culture and ethics researcher from Drury University and a
leader of the Association of Internet Researchers, commented, “The One Laptop Per
Child initiative is foundering not so much on issues of economics, but more on issues of
culture. Most of the non-Western ‘targets’ for the initiative use languages that are not
easily captured through the use of the standard Roman keyboard. More broadly, the
literacy required to manipulate most computer-based communications technologies and
venues is not to be taken for granted among all populations and demographic groups—
certainly not within the US and Western Europe, much less through other cultures in
which orality still predominates (e.g., indigenous peoples). For that, mobile phones
present a relatively straightforward interface—and talking, for most people at least, is
easy! In short, talking via a phone is far more universally realizable than presuming
everyone will be able and willing to communicate via a Roman keyboard and an
expensive computer.”
Some Say 2020 Will Offer a New Paradigm
Some survey participants said this scenario as written is shortsighted and we will have
moved into a different communications environment. “A new technology will blow all of
this away,”wrote one anonymous respondent, and another wrote, “Another ‘killer app’
will emerge before 2020 that will change everything; communication will not achieve
stability in the 21
st
century.”
View Report Online:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/The-Future-of -the-Internet-III.aspx
Pew Internet & American Life Project
An initiative of the Pew Research Center
1615 L St., NW – Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20036
202-419-4500 | pewinternet.org
Summary of Findings 3
Acknowledgements 15
Background 16
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
20
Scenario 2: The Internet and the Evolution of
Social Tolerance
29
Scenario 3: The Evolution of IP Law and Copyright
Protection
35
Scenario 4: The Evolution of Privacy, Identity, and
Forgiveness
46
Scenario 5: The Evolution of Augmented Reality
and Virtual Reality
60
Scenario 6: The Evolution of the Internet User
Interface
72
Scenario 7: The Evolution of the Architecture of
the Internet
81
Scenario 8: The Evolving Concept of Time for
Work, Leisure
91
Pew Internet & American Life Project
The Future of the Internet III | 19
Lee Rainie
Director
Janna Anderson
The Future of the Internet III
A survey of experts shows they expect major tech
advances as the phone becomes a primary device for
online access, voice-recognition improves, and the
structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree
about whether this will lead to more social tolerance,
more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.
December 2008
CONTENTS
Summary of Findings
NOTES
1
The results of the first survey can be found at:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf. 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 be found at
the website for “Imagining the Internet”at http://www.elon.edu/predictions/default.html.
Acknowledgements
Background
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
Findings
Technology stakeholders and critics were asked in an online survey to assess
scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the
Internet and they said the following:
l
The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for
most people in the world in 2020.
l
The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will
not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or
forgiveness.
l
Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more
prevalent and accepted by 2020.
l
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.
l
The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical
and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected,
and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
l
“Next-generation”engineering of the network to improve the current
Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the
architecture from scratch.
About the Methodology and Interpreting the Findings
This is the third canvassing of Internet specialists and analysts by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project.
1
While a wide range of opinion from experts, organizations, and
interested institutions was sought, this survey should not be taken as a representative
canvassing of Internet experts. By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting
effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample.
Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this
survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life
in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total
of 1,196 participants who shared their views.
Experts were located in two ways. First, nearly a thousand were identified in an
extensive canvassing of scholarly, government, and business documents from the period
1990-1995 to see who had ventured predictions about the future impact of the Internet.
Several hundred of them participated in the first two surveys conducted by Pew Internet
and Elon University, and they were recontacted for this survey. Second, expert
participants were hand-picked due to their positions as stakeholders in the development
of the Internet or they were reached through the leadership listservs of top technology
organizations including the Internet Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the
World Wide Web Consortium, the United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet
Governance, Internet2, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, International Telecommunication
Union, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Association of Internet
Researchers, and the American Sociological Association's Information Technology
Research section. For the first time, some respondents were invited to participate
through personal messages sent using a social network, Facebook.
In all, 578 experts identified through these channels responded to the survey.
While many respondents are at the pinnacle of Internet leadership, some of the survey
respondents are “working in the trenches” of building the Web. Most of the people in this
latter segment of responders came to the survey by invitation because they are on the
email list of the Pew Internet & American Life Project or are otherwise known to the
Project. They are not necessarily opinion leaders for their industries or well-known
futurists, but it is striking how much their views were distributed in ways that paralleled
those who are celebrated in the technology field.
In all, 618 additional respondents participated in this survey from these quarters. Thus,
the expert results are reported as the product of 578 responses and the lines listing “all
responses” include these additional 618 participants.
This report presents the views of respondents in two ways. First, we cite the aggregate
views of those who responded to our survey. Second, we have quoted many of their
opinions and predictions in the body of this report, and even more of their views are
available on the Elon University-Pew Internet & American Life Project Web site:
http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org/. Scores more responses to each of the scenarios
are cited on specific web pages devoted to each scenarios. Those urls are given in the
chapters devoted to the scenarios.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: Themes Many Respondents Struck in
Their Answers
Here are some of the major themes that run through respondents’ answers:
The mobile phone will be the dominant connection tool:More than three-
quarters of the expert respondents (77%) agreed with a scenario that posited that the
mobile computing device—with more-significant computing power in 2020—will be the
primary Internet communications platform for a majority of people across the world.
They agreed that connection will generally be offered under a set of universal standards
internationally, though many registered doubts about corporations’ and regulators’
willingnesstomakeithappen.
Heightened social tolerance may not be a Web 2.0 result:Respondents were
asked if people will be more tolerant in 2020 than they are today. Some 56% of the
expert respondents disagreed with a scenario positing that social tolerance will advance
significantly by then, saying communication networks also expand the potential for
hate, bigotry, and terrorism. Some 32% predicted tolerance will grow. A number of the
survey participants indicated that the divide between the tolerant and intolerant could
possibly be deepened because of information-sharing tactics people use on the Internet.
Air-typing, touch interfaces, and talking to devices will become common: A
notable majority of the respondents (64%) favored the idea that by 2020 user interfaces
will offer advanced talk, touch, and typing options, and some added a fourth “T”—think.
Those who chose to elaborate in extended responses disagreed on which of the four will
make the most progress by 2020. There was a fairly even yes-no split on the likely
success of voice-recognition or significant wireless keyboard advances and mostly
positive support of the advance of interfaces involving touch and gestures—this was
highly influenced by the introduction of the iPhone and various multitouch surface
computing platforms in 2007 and 2008. A number of respondents projected the
possibility of a thought-based interface—neural networks offering mind-controlled
human-computer interaction. Many expressed concerns over rude, overt public displays
by people using ICTs (“yakking away on their phones about their latest foot fungus”)
and emphasized the desire for people to keep private communications private in future
digital interfaces.
IP law and copyright will remain unsettled:Three out of five respondents (60%)
disagreed with the idea that legislatures, courts, the technology industry, and media
companies will exercise effective content control by 2020. They said “cracking”
technology will stay ahead of technology to control intellectual property (IP) or policy
regulating IP. And they predicted that regulators will not be able to come to a global
agreement about intellectual property. Many respondents suggested that new economic
models will have to be implemented, with an assumption that much that was once
classified as paid content will have to be offered free or in exchange for attention or
some other unit of value. Nearly a third of the survey respondents (31%) agreed that IP
regulation will be successful by 2020; they said more content will be privatized, some
adding that this control might be exercised at the hardware level, through Internet-
access devices such as smartphones.
The division between personal and professional time will disappear:A
majority of expert respondents (56%) agreed with the statement that in 2020 “few lines
(will) divide professional from personal time, and that’s OK.” While some people are
hopeful about a hyperconnected future with more freedom, flexibility, and life
enhancements, others express fears that mobility and ubiquity of networked computing
devices will be harmful for most people by adding to stress and challenging family life
and social life.
Network engineering research will build on the status quo—there isn’t likely
to be a “next-gen ”Internet:Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) said they
think the original Internet architecture will still be in place in 2020 even as it is
continually being refined. They did not believe the current Internet will be replaced by a
completely new “next-generation”system between now and 2020. Those who wrote
extended elaborations to their answers projected the expectation that IPv6 and the
Semantic Web will be vital elements in the continuing development of the Internet over
the next decade. Among other predictions: there will be more “walled gardens,”
separated Internet spaces, created by governments and corporations to maintain
network control; governments and corporations will leverage security fears to retain
power over individuals; crime, piracy, terror, and other negatives will always be
common elements in an open system.
Transparency may or may not make the world a better place:Respondents
were split evenly on whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater
transparency of people and institutions afforded by the Internet: 45% of expert
respondents agreed that transparency of organizations and individuals will heighten
individual integrity and forgiveness and 44% disagreed. The comments about this
prediction were varied: Some argued that transparency is an unstoppable force that has
positives and negatives; it might somehow influence people to live lives in which
integrity and forgiveness are more likely. Others posited that transparency won’t have
any positive influence, in fact it makes everyone vulnerable, and bad things will happen
because of it. Still others argued that the concept of “privacy” is changing, it is becoming
scarce, and it will be protected and threatened by emerging innovations; tracking and
databasing will be ubiquitous; reputation maintenance and repair will be required; some
people will have multiple digital identities; some people will withdraw.
Augmented reality and interactive virtual spaces might see more action:More
than half of respondents (55%) agreed with the notion that many lives will be touched in
2020 by virtual worlds, mirror worlds, and augmented reality. Yet 45% either disagreed
or didn’t anwer this question, so the sentiment isn’t overwhelming. People’s definitions
for the terms “augmented reality”and “virtual reality” are quite varied; smartphones
and GPS help people augment reality to a certain extent today and are expected to do
more soon; many think today’s social networks qualify as a form of virtual reality while
others define it in terms of Second Life or something even more immersive. Some noted
that by 2020 augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will have reached the
point of blurring with reality. Many indicated this will enhance the world, providing new
opportunities for conferencing, teaching, and 3-D modeling, and some added that
breakthroughs to come may bring significant change, including fusion with other
developments, such as genetic engineering. Some respondents expressed fear of the
negatives of AR and VR, including: new extensions of the digital divide; an increase in
violence and obesity; and the potential for addiction or overload. There is agreement that
user interfaces have to be much more intuitive for AR and VR to become more
universally adopted.
Thinking Ahead to 2020: A Sample of Revealing Quotations and
Predictions Selected from the Thousands Submitted
The evolution of the device for connection:“People in Africa turned paid
telephone minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency…There are already reasons
why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use cheap
telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways to use
connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”—Howard
Rheingold, Internet sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart
Mobs”
“By 2020, the network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world…Billions of people will have joined
the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.” —Susan Crawford,
founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) board member
“Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor populations, and the next five
years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal, and federal governments,
handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will win.”—danah boyd,
Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
“Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era—like transistor radios are
today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard
communications chip on many devices. We'll probably carry some kind of screen-based
reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to
communicate verbally, we'll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.” —Josh
Quittner, executive editor of Fortune Magazine and longtime technology journalist
and editor
The evolution of social tolerance: “Not in mankind’s nature. The first global satellite
link-up was 1967, BBC's Our World: the Beatles ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and we still have
war, genocide, and assassination (Lennon's poignantly).”—Adam Peake, policy
analyst for the Center for Global Communications and participant in the World
Summit on the Information Society
“Polarization will continue and the people on the extremes will be less tolerant of those
opposite them. At the same time, within homogenous groups (religious, political, social,
financial, etc.) greater tolerance will likely occur.”—Don Heath, Internet pioneer and
former president and CEO of the Internet Society
“Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or
kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, since one's real-world
surroundings will not have the homogeneity of one's online clan.”—Jim Horning,
chief scientist for information security at SPARTA Inc. and a founder of InterTrust’s
Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory
The evolution of intellectual property law and copyright: “Many people want IP
protection, but everyone wants to steal. Regardless of the legal mechanisms so far—e.g.,
automatic damages, compulsory copyrights—many people would prefer the illegal route,
perhaps because it runs up their adrenaline.” —Michael Botein, founding director of
the Media Law Center at New York University Law School
“Copying data is the natural state of computers; we would have to try to compromise
them too much to support this regime.”—Brad Templeton, chairman of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
“While I applaud the efforts of DRM [digital rights management] opponents, I am
discouraged by the progress DRM seems to continue to make in hardware as much as in
software. Having purchased an iPhone, I was delighted when Apple updated its software
to allow custom ringtones, only to discover that I needed to pay for a ringtone via the
iTunes Music Store even though the ringtone I wanted to use was one in which I own
the copyright!”—Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers
and editor of New Media & Society
“There will be cross-linking of content provider giants and Internet service provider
giants and that they will find ways to milk every last ‘currency unit’ out of the unwitting
and defenseless consumer. Governments will be strongly influenced by the business
conglomerates and will not do much to protect consumers. (Just think of the outrageous
rates charged by cable and phone company TV providers and wireless phone providers
today—it will only get worse.)” —Steve Goldstein, ICANN board member formerly of
the US National Science Foundation
“Copyright is a dead duck in a digital world. The old regime based its power on high
distribution costs. Those costs are going to zero. Bye-bye DRM.” —Dan Lynch, founder
of CyberCash and Interop Company, now a board member of the Santa Fe Institute
“You cannot stop a tide with a spoon. Cracking technology will always be several steps
ahead of DRM and content will be redistributed on anonymous networks.”—Giulio
Prisco, chief executive of Metafuturing Second Life, formerly of CERN
The evolution of privacy and transparency: “We will enter a time of mutually
assured humiliation; we all live in glass houses. That will be positive for tolerance and
understanding, but—even more important—I believe that young people will not lose
touch with their friends as my generation did and that realization of permanence in
relationships could—or should—lead to more care in those relationships.” —Jeff Jarvis,
top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of New York
Graduate School of Journalism
“Gen Y has a new notion of privacy. The old ‘never trust anyone over 30’ will turn into
‘never trust anyone who doesn't have embarrassing stuff online.’”—Jerry Michalski,
founder and president of Sociate
“Viciousness will prevail over civility, fraternity, and tolerance as a general rule, despite
the build-up of pockets or groups ruled by these virtues. Software will be unable to stop
deeper and more hard-hitting intrusions into intimacy and privacy, and these will
continue to happen.” —Alejandro Pisanty, ICANN and Internet Society leader and
directorofcomputerservicesatUniversidadNacionalAutónomadeMéxico
“By 2020, the Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by
businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have
happily traded their privacy—consciously or unconsciously—for consumer benefits such
as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and
manipulation will have largely disappeared.”—Nicholas Carr, author of the Rough
Type blog and “The Big Switch”
“The volume and ubiquity of personal information, clicktrails, personal media, etc., will
desensitize us. A super-abundance of transparency will lose its ability to shock. Maybe
there will be software-driven real-time reputation insurance service, offering monitoring
and repair to dinged reputations. This could be as ordinary as auto insurance or
mortgage insurance is today, and as automated as the nightly backups performed by
most online businesses. I don't agree that this will make us any kinder.”—Havi
Hoffman, Yahoo Developer Network
The evolution of augmented and virtual reality: “Mirror worlds are multi-
dimensional experiences with profound implications for education, medicine, and social
interaction. ‘Real life’ as we know it is over. Soon when anyone mentions reality, the
first question we will ask is, ‘Which reality are you referring to?’ We will choose our
realities, and in each reality there will be truths germane to that reality, and so we will
choose our truth as well.”—Barry Chudakov, principal with the Chudakov Company
“We in the present don't think of ourselves as living in ‘cyberspace,’ even though people
of a decade previous would have termed it such. Of the various forms of the metaverse,
however, the majority of activity will take place in blended or augmented-reality spaces,
not in distinct virtual/alternative world spaces.”—Jamais Cascio, a co-author of the
“Metaverse Roadmap Overview,”a report on the potential futures of VR, AR, and the
geoWeb
“Augmented reality will become nearly the de facto interface standard by 2020, with 2-
D and 3-D overlays over real-world objects providing rich information, context,
entertainment, and (yes) promotions and offers. At the same time, a metaverse
(especially when presented in an augmented-reality-overlay environment) provides
compelling ways to facilitate teamwork and collaboration while reducing overall travel
budgets.” —Jason Stoddard, managing partner at Centric/Agency of Change
“The virtual world removes all barriers of human limitation; you can be anyone you
want to be instead of being bound by physical and material limitations. That allows
people to be who they naturally are, freed of any perception they may have of
themselves based on their ‘real life’—it is the power of removing the barriers of your own
perception of yourself.” —Tze-Meng Tan, Multimedia Development Corporation in
Malaysia, a director at OpenSOS
“We are in the last generation of human fighter pilots. Already, drones in Iraq are
piloted in San Diego. What will improve is the ability of the artificial spaces to control
physical reality, to expand our reach more effectively in many aspects of the physical
universe.” —Dick Davies, partner at Project Management and Control Inc. and a past
president of the Association of Information Technology Professionals
“In a reaction to the virtual world, entrepreneurs will establish ‘virt-free’ zones where
reality is not augmented. In various heavily connected areas, there will be sanctuaries
(hotels, restaurants, bars, summer camps, vehicles) which people may visit to separate
themselves from adhesion or other realities.”—C.R. Roberts, Vancouver-based
technology reporter
“For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend, certain pundits can seriously
propose that the wave of the future is chatting using electronic hand-puppets. Flight
Simulator is not an aircraft, and typing at a screen is not an augmentation of the real
world.” —Seth Finkelstein, author of the Infothought blog, writer and programmer
“A map is not the territory and a letter is not the person. We have always had multiple
facades, for most, most common, work, home and play. The extension into more
immersive ‘unreal’ worlds is going to happen.”—Hamish MacEwen, consultant at
Open ICT in New Zealand
The evolution of user interfaces: “There will be ‘subvocal’ inputs that detect ‘almost
speech’ thatyouwill,butdonotactuallyvoice.Smallsensorsonteethwillalsoletyou
tap commands. Your eyeballs will track desires, sensed by your eyeglasses. And so on.”
—David Brin, futurist and author of “The Transparent Society”
“WiFi- and WiMax-enabled badges with voice recognition will act as personal
assistants—allowing you to talk with someone by saying their name, to post a voice blog,
or access directions from the Internet for the task at hand.”—Jim Kohlenberger,
director of Voice on the Net Coalition; senior fellow at the Benton Foundation
“I could see a whole physical way of communicating with our technology tools that
could be part of our health and exercise. A day answering e-mails could be a full-on
physical workout ; )….”—Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards
“We will see the display interface device separated from the input device over the next 12
years. Display devices will be everywhere, and you will be able to use them with your
input device. The input device might be virtual, as in the case of the iPhone or a
holographic keyboard, or they might resemble the keyboards and touchpads that people
are using today.”—Ross Rader, a director with Tucows who is active in the ICANN
Registrars constituency
“While air-typing and haptic gestures are widespread and ubiquitous, the arrival of
embedded optical displays, thought-transcription, eye-movement tracking, and
predictive-behavior modeling will fundamentally alter the human-computer interaction
model.” —Sean Steele, CEO and senior security consultant for infoLock Technologies
The evolution of network architecture: “The control-oriented telco (ITU) next-
generation network will not fully evolve, the importance of openness and enabling
innovation from the edges will prevail; i.e. Internet will essentially retain the key
characteristics we enjoy today, mainly because there's more money to be made.”—
Adam Peake, executive research fellow and telecommunications policy analyst at the
Center for Global Communications
“Some parts of the Internet may fragment, as nations pursue their own technology
trajectories. The Internet is so vastly complex, incremental upgrades seem to be the only
way to get anything done…Places like China may make big leaps and bounds because
there is less legacy.” —Anthony Townsend, research director, The Institute for the
Future
“Current Internet standards bodies and core Internet protocols are ossifying to such an
extent that security and performance requirements for next-generation applications will
require a totally new base platform. If current Internet base protocols survive, it will be
as a substrata paved over by new-generation smarter ways of connecting.”—Ian
Peter, Ian Peter and Associates and the Internet Mark 2 Project
“The Web must still be a messy, fabulous, exciting, dangerous, poetic, depressing, elating
place...akin to life; which is not a bad thing.”—Luis Santos, Universidade do Minho-
Braga, Portugal
“When have we ever stopped crime? If it is a choice between having some criminals
around and having a repressive government, I will take the former; they are much
easier to deal with.” —Leonard Witt, associate professor at Kennesaw State University
in Georgia and author of the Webog PJNet.org
“The Internet is not magical; it will be utterly over-managed by commercial concerns,
hobbled with ‘security’ micromanagement, and turned into money-shaped traffic for
business, the rest 90% paid-for content download and the rest of the bandwidth used for
market feedback.”—Tom Jennings, University of California-Irvine, creator of FidoNet
and builder of Wired magazine’s first online site
The evolution of work life and home life activity: “Corporate control of workers’
time—in the guise of work/ family balance—now extends to detailed monitoring of
when people are on and off work. The company town is replaced by ‘company time-
management,’ and it is work time that drives all other time uses. This dystopia
challenges the concept of white-collar work, and unionism is increasingly an issue.”—
Steve Sawyer, associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and
Technology, Penn State University
“The result may be longer, less-efficient working hours and more stressful home life.”—
Victoria Nash, director of graduate studies and policy and research officer, the
Oxford Internet Institute
“It’s already happened, for better or worse. Get over it.”—Anonymous respondent
(Many additional thoughtful and provocative comments appear in the main report.)
This Report Builds on the Online Resource Imagining the
Internet: A History and Forecast
At the invitation of Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project,
Elon University associate professor Janna Quitney Anderson began a research initiative
in the spring semester of 2003 to search for comments and predictions about the future
impact of the Internet during the time when the World Wide Web and browsers
emerged, between 1990 and 1995. The idea was to replicate the fascinating work of
Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective
Technology Assessment. Elon students, faculty, and staff studied government
documents, technology newsletters, conference proceedings, trade newsletters, and the
business press and gathered predictions about the future of the Internet. Eventually,
more than 4,000 early '90s predictions from about 1,000 people were amassed.
The early 1990s predictions are available in a searchable database online at the site
Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast and they are also the basis for a book
by Anderson titled Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives
(2005, Rowman & Littlefield).
The fruits of that work inspired additional research into the past and future of the
Internet, and the Imagining the Internet Web site
(www.imaginingtheInternet.org/) )—now numbering about 6,200 pages—includes
results from the entire series of Future of the Internet surveys, video and audio
interviews showcasing experts' predictions about the next 10 to 50 years, a children's
section, tips for teachers, a “Voices of the People” section on which anyone can post his
or her prediction, and information about the recent history of communications
technology.
We expect the site will continue to serve as a valuable resource for researchers, policy
makers, students, and the general public for decades to come. Further, we encourage
readers of this report to enter their own predictions at the site.
The series of Future of the Internet surveys is also published in book form by Cambria
Press.
Acknowledgements
About the Pew Internet & American Life Project : The Pew Internet Project is an
initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit “fact tank”that provides information
on the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping America and the world. Pew Internet
explores the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, the work place,
schools,healthcare,andcivic/politicallife.TheProjectisnonpartisanandtakesno
position on policy issues. Support for the project is provided by The Pew Charitable
Trusts. The Project’s Web site URL is: http://www.pewinternet.org.
Princeton Survey Research Associates International: PSRAI conducted the
survey that is covered in this report. It is an independent research company specializing
insocialandpolicywork.Thefirmdesigns,conductsandanalyzessurveysworldwide.
Itsexpertisealsoincludesqualitativeresearchandcontentanalysis.Withofficesin
Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., PSRAI serves the needs of clients around
thenationandtheworld.Thefirmcanbereachedat911CommonsWay,Princeton,
N.J. 08540, by telephone at 609-924-9204, by fax at 609-924-7499, or by email at
ResearchNJ@PSRA.com
The Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University’s School of
Communications: TheImaginingtheInternetCenteratElonUniversityholdsa
mirror to humanity’s use of communications technologies, informs policy development,
exposes potential futures, and provides a historic record. It has teamed with the Pew
Internet Project to complete a number of research studies, including the building of
Imagining the Internet (a foresight and history Web site), a survey of stakeholders at
the UN-administrated Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, and an
ethnographic study of a small town, “One Neighborhood, One Week on the Internet,”
all under the direction of Janna Quitney Anderson. For contact regarding Imagining the
Internet, send e-mail to predictions@elon.edu. The university site is:
http://www.elon.edu/.
Introduction
Predictions often inspire lively discussion about the future and they can help
stakeholders prepare to make adjustments to meet the needs associated with
technological change. Those who think about the future are best poised to influence it
and cope with it.
Many futurists, scientists, and long-term thinkers today argue that the acceleration of
technological change over the past decade has greatly increased the importance of
strategic vision. Technology innovations will continue to impact us. The question is
whether this process will reflect thoughtful planning or wash over us like an unstoppable
wave. This survey is aimed at gathering a collection of opinions regarding the
possibilities we all face.
How the Surveys Originated and Have Been Conducted
This research project got its start in mid-2001, when Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew
Internet & American Life Project, approached officials at Elon University with an idea
that the Project and the University might replicate the work of Ithiel de Sola Pool in his
1983 book Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment. Pool
and his students had looked at primary official documents, technology community
publications, speeches given by government and business leaders, and marketing
literature at the turn of the 20
th
Century to examine the kind of impacts experts thought
the telephone would have on Americans’ social and economic lives.
The idea was to apply Pool’s research method to the Internet, particularly focused on the
period between 1990 and 1995 when the World Wide Web and Web browsers emerged.
In the spring semester of 2003, Janna Quitney Anderson, a professor of journalism and
communications at Elon, led a research initiative that set out to accomplish this goal.
More than 4,200 predictive statements made in the early 1990s by 1,000 people were
logged and categorized. The result is available on the site Imagining the Internet: A
History and Forecast (www.imaginingtheInternet.org/).
We reasoned that if experts and technologists had been so thoughtful in the early 1990s
about what was going to happen, they would likely be equally as insightful looking
ahead from this moment. In 2004, we asked most of those whose predictions were in
the 1990-1995 database and additional experts to assess a number of predictions about
the coming decade, and their answers were codified in an initial futures survey: “The
Future of the
Internet” (http://www.pewInternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf).
Several years later, we repeated the process with some new predictions and an expanded
base of experts. In late 2005 and the first quarter of 2006, the Pew Internet Project
issued an e-mail invitation to a select group of technology thinkers, stakeholders, and
social analysts, asking them to complete the second scenario-based quantitative and
qualitative survey, “The Future of the Internet II.”The official analysis of the results of
that survey is available here:
http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet_2006.pdf
And we report here the results of a third survey that was conducted online between
December 26, 2007 and March 3, 2008. Some 1,196 people were generous enough to
take the time to respond to this Future of the Internet III online survey.
Nearly half of the Future III respondents are Internet pioneers who were online before
1993.Roughlyonefifthoftherespondentssaytheyliveandworkinanationoutsideof
North America.
The respondents' answers represent their personal views and in no way reflect the
perspectives of their employers. Many survey participants were hand-picked due to their
positions as stakeholders in the development of the Internet or they were reached
through the leadership listservs of top technology organizations including the Internet
Society, Association for Computing Machinery, the World Wide Web Consortium, the
United Nations’ Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, Internet2, Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, International Telecommunication Union, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, Association of Internet Researchers, and the American Sociological
Association's Information Technology Research section.
About the Survey Participants
Many top Internet leaders, activists, and commentators participated in the survey,
including Clay Shirky, Fred Baker, David Brin, Susan Crawford, Brad Templeton,
Howard Rheingold, Jim Kohlenberger, Josh Quittner, Seth Finkelstein, danah boyd, Hal
Varian, Jeff Jarvis, Anthony Rutkowski, Michael Botein, Steve Jones, Richard Bartle,
Alejandro Pisanty, Tom Vest, Milton Mueller, Bernardo Huberman, Jonne Soininen,
Don Heath, Doug Brent, Anthony Townsend, Steve Goldstein, Adam Peake, Basil
Crozier, Craig Partridge, Sebastien Bachollet, Geert Lovink, James Jay Horning, Dan
Lynch, Fernando Barrio, Roberto Gaetano, Christian Huitema, Susan Mernit, Jamais
Cascio, Norbert Klein, Tapio Varis, Martin Boyle, Ian Peter, Todd Spraggins, Catherine
Fitzpatrick, Tom Keller, Charles Kenny, Robert Cannon, Hakikur Rahman, Larry
Lannom, David Farrar, John Levine, Cliff Figallo, Sebastien Ricciardi, Lea Shaver, Seth
Gordon, Jim McConnaughey, Neil Mcintosh, Charles Ess, Alan Levin, David W. Maher,
Jonathan Dube, Thomas Vander Wal, Adrian Schofield, Clifford Lynch, Jerry Michalski,
Paul Miller, and David Moschella, to name a few.
A sampling of the workplaces of respondents includes the Internet Society, World Bank,
Booz Allen Hamilton, AT&T Labs, VeriSign, Cisco, Google, BBN Technologies, Fing,
Yahoo Japan, France Telecom, the International Telecommunication Union, Alcatel-
Lucent, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GLOCOM, AfriNIC, Electronic Privacy
Information Center, APNIC, Universiteit Maastricht, Amnesty International, BBC, PBS,
IBM, Microsoft, Forrester Research, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet
and Society, Open Society Institute, Open the Future, Yahoo, First Semantic, CNET,
Microsoft, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, IDG, FCC, Institute for the
Future, 1&1 Internet AG, Moody’s, HP Laboratories, Amazon.com, Gannett,
Lexis/Nexis, Tucows, InternetNZ, ICANN, Oxford Internet Institute, Institute of the
Information Society—Russia, The Center on Media and Society, Online News
Association, Nokia, the Association for the Advancement of Information Technology,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Network Cultures, Nortel,
Disney, DiploFoundation, Information Technology Industry Council, J-Lab,
Information Society Project at Yale University, Santa Fe Institute, the London School of
Economics, the University of California-Berkeley, NASA, the Singapore Internet
Research Center, Princeton University, the federal government of Canada, several policy
divisions of the US government, and many dozens of others.
Participants described their primary area of Internet interest as “research
scientist”(12%); “technology developer or administrator” (11%); “entrepreneur or
business leader” (10%); “author, editor, or journalist” (9%); “futurist or
consultant” (7%); “advocate, voice of the people, or activist user”(5%); “legislator or
politician” (1%); or “pioneer or originator”(2%); however many participants chose
“other”(24%) for this survey question or did not respond (18%).
The Scenarios Were Built to Elicit Deeply Felt Opinions
The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University do not advocate policy
outcomes related to the Internet. The predictive scenarios included in the survey were
structured to provoke reaction, not because we think any of them will necessarily come
tofruition.
The scenarios for this survey and survey analysis were crafted after a study of the
responses from our previous surveys and of the predictions made in reports by the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations
Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, the Metaverse Roadmap, The
Institute for the Future, Global Business Network, and other foresight organizations and
individual foresight leaders.
The 2020 scenarios were constructed to elicit engaged responses to many-layered issues,
so it was sometimes the case that survey participants would agree with most or part of a
scenario, but not all of it. In addition to trying to pack several ideas into each scenario,
we tried to balance them with “good,”“bad,” and “neutral” outcomes. The history of
technology is full of evidence that tech adoption brings both positive and negative
results.
After each portion of the survey we invited participants to write narrative responses
providing an explanation for their answers. Not surprisingly, the most interesting
product of the survey is the ensuing collection of open-ended discussion, predictions, and
analyses written by the participants in response to our material. We have included many
of those responses in this report. A great number of additional responses are included on
the Imagining the Internet site, available at: http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org.
Since participants’ answers evolved in both tone and content as they went through the
questionnaire, the findings in this report are presented in the same order as the original
survey. The respondents were asked to “sign” each written response they were willing to
have credited to them in the Elon-Pew database and in this report. The quotations in the
report are attributed to those who agreed to have their words quoted. When a quote is
not attributed to someone, it is because that person chose not to sign his or her written
answer.
To make this report more readable and include many voices, some of the lengthier
written elaborations have been edited.
Prediction and Reactions
PREDICTION:The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most
people in the world. In 2020, while "one laptop per child" and other initiatives to
bring networked digital communications to everyone are successful on many levels, the
mobile phone—now with significant computing power—is the primary Internet
connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world, providing
information in a portable, well-connected form at a relatively low price. Telephony is
offered under a set of universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, making for reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world
to another. At this point, the "bottom" three-quarters of the world's population account
for at least 50% of all people with Internet access—up from 30% in 2005.
Expert Respondents’Reactions (N=578)
MostlyAgree77%
MostlyDisagree22%
DidNotRespond*%
All Respondents’Reactions (N=1,196)
MostlyAgree81%
MostlyDisagree19%
DidNotRespond*%
Note:Sinceresultsarebasedonanonrandomsample,amarginoferrorcannotbe
computed. The “prediction” was composed to elicit responses and is not a formal
forecast.
Respondents were presented with a brief set of information outlining the status quo of
the issue 2007 that prefaced this scenario. It read:
According to the UN/ITU World Information Society Report 2007, there has been
some progress in improving digital inclusion: In 1997 the nearly three-quarters of the
world's population who lived in low-income and lower-middle-income economies
accounted for just 5% of the world's population with Internet access
2
By 2005, they
accounted for just over 30%. A number of commercial and non-profit agencies are
combining forces to bring inexpensive laptop computers to remote regions of the world
to connect under-served populations. In addition, by the end of 2008 more than half the
world's population is expected to have access to a mobile phone.
Overview of Respondents' Reactions
A significant majority of expert respondents agreed with this predicted
future. The consensus is that mobile devices will continue to grow in
importance because people need to be connected, wherever they are. Cost-
effectiveness and access are also factors driving the use of phones as
connection devices. Many respondents believe that mobile devices of the
future will have significant computing power. The experts fear that limits set
by governments and/or corporations seeking control might impede positive
evolution and diffusion of these devices; according to respondents, this
scenario’s predicted benefit of “effortless”connectivity is dependent on
corporate and government leaders’willingness to serve the public good.
The overwhelming majority of respondents agreeing with this scenario took note of the
current boom in cell phone and smartphone use and imagined its extension. “By 2020
we should see several billion cell phones shipping per year, most of which will be
Internet-capable; this will probably dwarf the volumes of other Internet-capable
devices, such as PCs,”wrote one anonymous participant.
There are 6.6 billion people in the world, and the UN estimates that 1.2 billion have
access to and use the Internet (2007 figures). Wireless Intelligence, a market database,
reports that it took 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell, just four years for
the second billion, and two years for the third billion.
3
The firm projects there will be 4
billion cell phones in the world by the end of 2008; about 11 percent were Internet-
enabled in 2007, and it is expected that could rise to 15 percent by the end of 2008. (It is
important to remember that some people own more than one mobile phone—in 2007 it
was estimated that 700 million people owned more than one—so 3 billion phones does
not equate to 3 billion people who have and use mobile phones.)
Several survey participants noted in their written elaborations to the survey question
that connectedness serves humanity in so many ways that even people who are
struggling to make a dollar a day in the world’s least-developed nations find the
economics of mobile telephony to be manageable and sometimes even vital to their lives.
“Communication is a basic human need,”responded Howard Rheingold, Internet
sociologist and author of “Virtual Community”and “Smart Mobs.”“People who are
trying to scrape by have immediate need for connection to information about local labor
and commodities markets. Public-health and disaster-relief information can be an SMS
[short-message-service—or “text”] message away. People in Africa turned paid telephone
minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency, because they had the need to transfer
small amounts of money. Billions of squatters might live in slums but still ingeniously
and often illegally deliver the construction and utilities services they need. There are
already reasons why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use
cheap telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways
to use connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.”
Lutfor Rahman, of the Association for Advancement of Information Technology in
Bangladesh, said mobile communication is world-changing. “Before introducing the
mobile phone in remote areas of Bangladesh, the exchange of information was through
physically meeting,”he wrote. “That wasted much time, and sometimes it became
impossible in short time because of lack of communication facilities.”
Gbenga Sesan, a Nigerian and consultant on the use of the Internet for development
for Paradigm Initiative, has written extensively about the use of mobile
communications. “With the rise in the number of mobile phone users across the
continent, it is only wise to start planning that the future will be driven through mobile
phones—governance, businesses, networking, leisure, and more,” he commented. “The
story will be the same across the world. Regardless of technology choice (GSM, CDMA,
etc), mobile telephones will form the core of human interaction and livelihood. And
when you consider the fact that some mobile phones were competing with computers in
2007, you can only wonder if owning a PC will matter by December 31, 2019.”
It Will Be More Computer Than Phone
Many who responded with a further elaboration on this scenario said while the device
we will be using will be small and possibly resemble today’s wireless phones in its shape,
it will actually be a multitasking computer, used less for voice communication than for
other tasks. “The computing power that will be able to fit into a phone-size device in 13
years will be incredible,” wroteananonymousrespondent.
“By 2020 a device that more closely resembles today's mobile phone rather than today's
computer will certainly be the primary connection tool,”said Paul Miller, a technology
evangelist for Talis, a UK-based Web company, and blogger for ZDNet. “Whether it is at
all 'phone'-like, or even used very often for voice-only communication is more open to
question, though.”
Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member, agreed. “By 2020 we'll stop
talking about ‘phones,’ with any luck,” shewrote.“Nor will we be talking about
‘telephony.’ Those terms, I hope, will be dead. These devices will just be handsets of
which we'll be very fond. They'll have screens that are just large enough for us to feel
immersedinthevisualsprovided.Whatwillwebedoing?UsingtheInternet.
Interacting, doing work, talking, participating, uploading to the cloud. By 2020, the
network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been (with any luck) disintermediated. We'll
have standard network connections around the world, but they won't be optimized on
billing (as telephone and wireless connections are now). Billions of people will have
joined the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’
either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.”
Rich Miller, CEO for Replicate Technologies and an Internet pioneer with ARPANET,
wrote, “The ‘phone’ as such is more likely to be a personal media server/media gateway.
This same personal media server—size not much different than today's mobile phone—
permits varieties of ‘terminal’ devices, including display, voice input/output, etc. Audio
and video interfaces are more likely to be separate devices (like today's Bluetooth
headset, but with more user interface controls).”
Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate dean
at the University of Illinois-Chicago, projected, “By 2020 I don't think it will be so easy
to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop. These will blend into a general
‘mobile computing’ category of device (for which we probably don't yet have a name).”
Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of Voice on the Net Coalition, a senior fellow for
the Benton Foundation and former White House policy advisor, commented, “The
mobile ‘phone’ will largely be eclipsed and replaced by the open network device—an open
mobile computing device also capable of voice. But the assumption is correct that these
mobile devices will be more significant and ubiquitous than wired devices. In terms of
inclusion, there are already developing countries that have set up open and competitive
wireless markets to foster these innovations and reap their benefits. But other developing
countries that still have government-run telecom sectors or that haven’t enabled
wireless competition could be further left behind.”
And Jeff Jarvis, top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of
New York Graduate School of Journalism, and many other respondents said we should
not concentrate on the appliance, but the connectivity. “We will have many devices that
are constantly connected; in that sense, it's connectivity that will be mobile and the
devices will merely plug in,”Jarvis explained. “This will lead to a world that is not only
connected but also live and immediate. Witnesses will share news as they witness it. We
can get answers to any question anytime. We can stay in constant touch with the people
we know, following their lives as we follow RSS and Twitter feeds.”
Respondents Say Mobility Is Key to Sharing Information
Everywhere in the World
In 2007 the bottom three-quarters of the world’s population included about 30 percent
of the people who have Internet access. The 2020 scenario proposed to survey
respondents that this number will rise to 50 percent. Participants agreed that mobile
communications devices—most of them not yet Internet-connected—have made an
amazing impact already and will continue to bridge the digital divide and promote
digital inclusion. Geert Lovink wrote, “We now still look at the world from a 'digital
divide' perspective, but that will soon be of little use. The massive use by the 'emerging'
underclasses of the 'Global South' of mobile phones should be interpreted as a necessity
of the labour force to gain mobility in order to increase their output.”
Charles Kenny, senior economist for the World Bank, the international aid agency,
commented, “The mobile phone will be used for an increasing range of services such as
m-banking in developing countries, but it will also remain key as a tool for voice
communication. For around a quarter of the world's population still officially illiterate
(and many more functionally illiterate), voice telephony will remain the primary means
of communicating over distance.”An anonymous survey participant added, “Voice
communication is the most common method used by humans to communicate, and
devices with voice capabilities will be key.”
Jonne Soininen, Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Society leader and
manager of Internet affairs for Nokia Siemens Network, added, “In many places having
fixed infrastructure is not possible either physically or economically, thus, making
mobile systems the viable option for Internet access.”
Active Internet Society and ICANN participant Cheryl Langdon-Orr said she takes
issue with the figure of 50 percent of the world being connected, and she hopes for more.
“Mobile device connectivity to the Internet is indeed a cost-effective e-future vision for
many,”she wrote, “but in my utopia where the Internet Society states ‘The Internet is
for Everyone’ we would be looking at much more than 50 percent of people being online
by 2020.”
And Sudip Aryal, president of the Nepal Rural Information Technology Development
Society, wrote, “to meet this target of 50 percent or even more than that, each and every
country should make ICT as a national-priority issue. Just like the awareness of
HIV/AIDS and use of condoms, the national and international bodies must launch a
program to aware about the ‘importance of Internet in one's life’ to the grass root
communities.”
Michael Botein, a telecommunications law expert at New York University and
consultant to the Federal Communications Commission, said improved, affordable
mobile technology could help pave the way to a friendlier world. “It is difficult to foresee
a future short of a technological breakthrough in which mobile technology will have
enough bandwidth to provide data services, real-time video, and the like,” he wrote. “On
a positive note, however, cellular will allow the beginnings of universal service in most
parts of the world—as already in Latin America and Africa—and thus may help break
down long-held hostilities.”
Several respondents, including Neil McIntosh, director of editorial development for the
top news site guardian.co.uk, based in London, said, “a greater and more fundamental
problem, however, may be poor literacy and continued widespread poverty, which
technology by itself can't solve.”
Some Experts Express Doubts About Interoperability and Open
Networks
Some of those who chose to mostly agree with this scenario did so while expressing
reservations about parts of it. A number of them suggested that governments and/or
corporations concerned with retaining or gaining more control over use of the Internet
might limit some types of connection in certain parts of the world, and others projected
a potential lack of universal standards and protocols in a world of changing technology.
Michael Zimmer, resident fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School, wrote, “I agree almost entirely with this prediction…My only hesitation is
whether there will be universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators
internationally, since US mobile providers have shown little interest in providing full
interoperability and open devices to take full advantage of new mobile services.”
Social media research expert danah boyd of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for
Internet and Society wrote, “Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor
populations, and the next five years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal,
and federal governments, handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will
win. If the carriers continue to own the market, network access through mass adoption
of the mobile will be far slower than if governments would begin blanketing their land
with WiFi (or network access on other spectrum channels) as a public-good
infrastructure project and handset makers would begin making cheap accessible
handsets for such access. The latter dynamic would introduce network access (and
telephony) to many more people, much to the chagrin of carriers.”
Ross Rader, a member of the ICANN Registrars Constituency and executive for
Tucows Inc., wrote, “This scenario may likely happen over the next few years, not the
next 12. The only real obstacle to this level of adoption and social integration lies with
the willingness of the telecommunications industry to resist the temptation to segregate
and verticalize its offerings. In other words, the communications network market must
be made much more competitive than it is today. Handsets need to be freed from
applications, and applications need to be freed from networks. Only truly open networks
will drive the sort of adoption envisaged in this scenario. We are starting to see the first
glimpses of this today with Google's Android, Verizon's open network initiative, the
power of the iPhone, but much work in all of these, and other, areas remains to be done
before the networks, applications, and handsets markets are fully competitive.”
A few respondents said they believe corporate leaders are interested in the positive
diffusion of affordable technology tools to less-developed areas of the world. Peter Kim,
a senior analyst for Forrester Research, commented, “Handset manufacturers have
already started to focus on countries with lower GDP. Continued efficiency in
production and increase in computing power, along with the natural desire of humans
to connect will help make this scenario a reality.”
Many survey participants expressed concerns about pricing. One anonymous respondent
wrote, “The success of the mobile phone as a universal-access device is contingent on
adoption of flat-rate style charges, as is normal for Internet applications, rather than
high per-minute charges which currently dominate mobile-pricing structures.”
Bandwidth, Screen Size, Poor User-Interface Are Among the
Other Potential Limits Cited
Some respondents who mostly disagreed with the scenario wrote that delivery will
continue to be more efficient through earth-based connections. “Wireless doesn't ever
provide as much bandwidth as wired connections; wireless will always be slower, thus
second-best,” wrote one anonymous respondent. “Primary ‘work’ will still be done over
wired connections, with wireless filling in the gaps and supporting mobile applications.”
Another wrote, “Will there be enough wireless infrastructure for truly complex Internet
applications on a phone?”
Another more multi-layered response in regard to limitations of the scenario came from
an anonymous survey participant: “Wireless technologies have a number of inherent
problems including but not limited to interference and capacity. The simple log trend of
traffic and data patterns precludes wireless. While some form of ubiquitous wireless
access will be available most places, fibre will be more important than ever. Phones also
have UI restrictions, any conception of phones without other peripheral interfacing
technologies such as HUDS eye movement/brain interfaces simply will not meet the
needs.”
“Unless the phone—which will really be seen as the one device that we carry around that
includes voice, text, still/video camera, GPS, AV player, computer, voice-to -digital-
information interface, Internet, television, bank account, etc.—has the capacity to
project at least a 15" display, it will be too small to use as the primary connection tool for
the majority of world-wide users,” wrote Peter Eckart, director of health information
technology for the Illinois Public Health Institute. “The majority of us will carry our
digital presence indicator with us from place to place on that device, but the bandwidth
and interface will be provided by our home or work or coffee shop, with the device there
to maintain digital identity. I do agree that the mobile device will be the primary or only
connection for poorer folks. People's wealth or income will be reflected in the size of their
display, the number of Ds (2 or 3), their connection speed, amount of digital storage,
and most importantly, their level of access to information stores.”
Adrian Schofield, a leader in the World Information Technology and Services Alliance
and manager of applied research at the Johannesburg Center for Software Engineering
in South Africa, wrote that people will use multiple devices. “There are likely to be two
distinct types of hand-held device—the mobile phone and the mobile PDA,”he
commented. “The phone will be the instrument that enables the less economically
empowered people to communicate by voice and text and to perform basic financial and
government transactions. The PDA will offer the full range of communications and
computing facilities, including TV, GPS, and video camera. Using improved solar
technology, battery life will be significantly extended and offices, hotels, and other
venues will provide free plasma screens for those who wish to access a larger image than
the one offered on the device.”
Well-known economist and technology expert Hal Varian, of Google and the
University of California-Berkeley, responded, “The big problem with the cell phone is the
UI [user interface], particularly on the data side. We are waiting for a breakthrough.”
Fabrice Florin, the executive director of NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news
network, wrote, “While I agree that the mobile phone will play a growing role as a low-
cost computing platform, I disagree that it will be the 'primary Internet connection and
the only one for a majority of the people across the world.' Other computing platforms
and connectivity options will become widely available by then, such as cheap computers
(or wall-based computing environments) with landline or comparable broadband
connections. I predict that these faster connections and larger-screen platforms will be
more affordable and effective from a productivity standpoint than small and slow
mobile platforms.”
One Laptop Per Child Is Seen as Limited
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a large-scale US-based project to provide affordable,
practical computing and Internet capabilities to people in underserved communities
around the world. The effort has brought together people from the technology industry,
non-governmental organizations, and governments in the process of designing,
manufacturing, and distributing these tools.
The Future of the Internet III survey was distributed at about the same time the OLPC
computers became available; they have come under some criticism in the popular
media, and they met some criticism from survey participants. Scott Smith wrote,
“OLPC-style efforts are already beginning to fragment at the start of 2008 even before
the actual OLPC initiative gains any real ground.”Seth Finkelstein wrote, “One
Laptop Per Child is a classic ‘ugly American’-style project.”
Charles Ess, an online culture and ethics researcher from Drury University and a
leader of the Association of Internet Researchers, commented, “The One Laptop Per
Child initiative is foundering not so much on issues of economics, but more on issues of
culture. Most of the non-Western ‘targets’ for the initiative use languages that are not
easily captured through the use of the standard Roman keyboard. More broadly, the
literacy required to manipulate most computer-based communications technologies and
venues is not to be taken for granted among all populations and demographic groups—
certainly not within the US and Western Europe, much less through other cultures in
which orality still predominates (e.g., indigenous peoples). For that, mobile phones
present a relatively straightforward interface—and talking, for most people at least, is
easy! In short, talking via a phone is far more universally realizable than presuming
everyone will be able and willing to communicate via a Roman keyboard and an
expensive computer.”
Some Say 2020 Will Offer a New Paradigm
Some survey participants said this scenario as written is shortsighted and we will have
moved into a different communications environment. “A new technology will blow all of
this away,”wrote one anonymous respondent, and another wrote, “Another ‘killer app’
will emerge before 2020 that will change everything; communication will not achieve
stability in the 21
st
century.”
View Report Online:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/The-Future-of -the-Internet-III.aspx
Pew Internet & American Life Project
An initiative of the Pew Research Center
1615 L St., NW – Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20036
202-419-4500 | pewinternet.org
Summary of Findings 3
Acknowledgements 15
Background 16
Scenario 1: The Evolution of Mobile Internet
Communications
20
Scenario 2: The Internet and the Evolution of
Social Tolerance
29
Scenario 3: The Evolution of IP Law and Copyright
Protection
35
Scenario 4: The Evolution of Privacy, Identity, and
Forgiveness
46
Scenario 5: The Evolution of Augmented Reality
and Virtual Reality
60
Scenario 6: The Evolution of the Internet User
Interface
72
Scenario 7: The Evolution of the Architecture of
the Internet
81
Scenario 8: The Evolving Concept of Time for
Work, Leisure
91
Pew Internet & American Life Project
The Future of the Internet III | 20
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