The Internet’s Future? It Depends on Whom You Ask, from the NY Times
Some interesting quotes:
Some of the more cherished notions of the Internet age – that it isolates people from real-world interaction, for instance, or that people use the Web to find reinforcement for their political views and filter out opposing ones – generate deeply divided views among the specialists. Some 42 percent of respondents agreed with the assertion that civic involvement will increase in the next 10 years as people seek and find organizations to join online; nearly 30 percent disagreed. Roughly 40 percent viewed the proliferation of online medical resources as a potential boon to health care management and access; 30 percent of the specialists thought that unlikely.
One assertion on which there was widespread agreement was that the infrastructure of the Internet will be the target of “at least one devastating attack” in the next 10 years. Sixty-six percent of respondents agreed.
…the Internet and the rise of the blogger are expected to drive greater change in the news media and publishing industries than in any other sector of society. Internet specialists also expect broad changes in education and working life, and 50 percent of respondents say they believe – despite all of the lawsuits filed by the recording and movie industries against online pirates – that the vast majority of Internet users will still be freely trading digital materials via anonymous networks by 2014.
And here’s the Pew report, The Future of the Internet.
As an aside, I couldn’t find an authoritative version of this Yogi Berra quote. Everyone agreed on the “especially about the future” part, but there were about a hundred different versions of the first part of the sentence.