January 18, 2005, 11:00 AM — Most Internet experts expect attacks on the US network infrastructure in the coming decade. Worse, two-thirds of those surveyed expect a "devastating attack", according to a new report on the Future of the Internet.
Other predictions:
* More government surveillance;
* The virtualization of education;
* The blurring between work and play; and
* The perseverance of anonymous music file sharing.
The Pew Internet Project and Elon University recently asked over 1,000 people about the Future of the Internet. Half of those surveyed were Internet pioneers, people that were active on the Internet prior to 1993. Each person was asked to complete a 24-question survey.
"We were struck by the prescience of many experts at the dawning of the Web era about the way the Internet would affect people and organizations," said Asst. Prof. Janna Quitney Anderson, one of the report's co-authors. "It just made sense to us to go back to many of them and ask what they foresee in the next decade."
Highlights of the report:
* 59% of those surveyed predict that more government and business surveillance will occur as computing devices proliferate and become embedded in appliances, cars, phones, and even clothes.
* 57% predict that virtual classes will become more widespread in formal education and that students might at least occasionally be grouped with others who share their interests and skills, rather than by age.
* 56% predict that the boundary between work and leisure will diminish and family dynamics will change because of that.
* 50% predict that anonymous, free, music file sharing on peer-to-peer networks will still be easy to perform a decade from now.
Pew's Susannah Fox notes, "This group of experts provides the perspective of long experience. Half were online before the advent of the Web. Institutions that resist change, like education and health care, come in for the sharpest criticism among these information revolutionaries."
Looking Back
In addition to looking ahead, the Pew-Elon survey asked the experts to describe ways that the changes brought by the Internet have surprised them.
Pleasant surprises:
* The explosion of information sources available on Web
* Improvements in online search technology
* The spread of peer-to-peer networks
* The rise of blogs.
Unpleasant surprises:
* Lack of change in educational institutions
* Gaps in Internet access for many groups of people
* Political institutions have been slow to benefit from the Internet
The Pew Internet Project is a non-partisan, non-profit initiative of the Pew Research Center that researches the social impact of the Internet. The full report is available at the Pew site.
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