Pew Study: The Internet In 2020

A couple of weeks ago the Pew Internet & American Life Project released their third internet evolution report titled The Future of the Internet III. To prepare the report, Pew surveyed internet leaders, activists and analysts and found most believe portable hand held devices (what we all call "phones" now) will become our primary online devices as voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves.

Here's a list of the key findings from the report:

• 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.
  

You can download a copy of the Pew Report summary here and full report here.

A Social Networking Thinker You Should Know

I've been sick with the flu the last couple of days and, as a result, have had an opportunity to catch up with a number of my favorite bloggers. Jim McGee, over at McGee’s Musings wrote an excellent post yesterday titled Thinkers you should know - danah boyd. Danah is a Ph.D. candidate at the Berkeley School of Information and her research focuses on understanding social networks and their interplay with youth culture. In a 14 minute interview with Discover Magazine, she discusses how kids use technology, where mobile phones are going and the Facebook versus MySpace "smackdown".

Here's a link to the video at Discover Magazine <- click here to watch.

The interview is excellent and highly recommended. Here's how Jim finishes his post: her insights are worth factoring into your thinking about Enterprise 2.0. If nothing else, she’ll help you understand your future work force. I'll take it a step further and say she'll help you understand your children, your grandchildren...... and, if you are faculty, your current and future students,

Jevon MacDonald, who blogs at http://socialwrite.com, wrote an interesting reply to Jim's post on the FASTForwardBlog: Danah’s work has been incredibly important. Anyone wanting to really understand the social underpinnings of Enterprise 2.0 (social computing in general) should spend a week just reading everything Danah has written.

Danah blogs at http://www.danah.org - watch the video and take some time (maybe not a week but an hour or so) to take a look at her work if you get a chance.

Thanks Jim for your post. Oh yes - I'll be getting to the technical follow-up piece on Internet Traffic Shaping as soon as I feel better!