Tuesday, December 16, 2008

The Future of the Internet

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released "The Future of the Internet III", a non-scientific survey of anticipated trends. Key findings reported by the Pew:
  • The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
  • The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
  • Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
  • Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
  • The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
  • Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.
My inferences for public libraries:
  • we need to pay serious attention to mobile computing
  • more people will expect social web features as a norm
  • we'll stay caught in the crossfire on intellectual property issues
  • informal self-directed education will remain important
  • we'll need to be creative in developing information delivery channels
It's worth looking at full report details.

No comments: