New Pew Report on Future of the Internet

The third in a series of Pew reports on the future of the Internet was just released yesterday. For this report, over 1000 technology leaders/commentators were surveyed regarding the impact networked technologies will have on society by 2010. 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.

As librarians/information professionals, it is so important for us be familiar with trends and predictions for the future of information access. Even for our own personal needs, how will networked technologies change our own relationships--with families, with work, with future co-workers and students?

View the project page which outlines the methodology and key findings or read the entire report.