Pew director Rainie says Internet becoming more progressive, invisible

Lee Rainie gives the final keynote address of the night at FutureWeb2010. Photo by Dan Rickershauser.

In the final address of the night at FutureWeb 2010, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project, discussed the future of the Internet and the research conducted by Pew.

Rainie began working with professor Janna Anderson and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet project about a decade ago to gather predictions on the future of the Internet by technology experts and citizens.

“Our strategy was to be provocative,” Rainie said… “We started each of our questions with an obvious statement about the evolution of technology then added a “therefore” clause…we wanted them to react.”

According to Rainie, he wanted to collect “bad information from good people.”

What he got was good information and rich commentary on the impact of the Internet in the social realm.

“They had smart things and generally thoughtful things to say about the Internet,” Rainie said. “It’s in the exploration of those expository answers, those narrative answers, that gives us new knowledge.”

In the most recent research, there were 895 responses. Of the respondents, 371 were past participants and 524 were new to Rainie and Anderson’s work.

Some of the predictions included:

Are hot new gadgets and apps evident now?

-16 percent of experts said hot gadgets will not be surprising, 81 percent said they will come out of the blue

By 2020 will online anonymity be easier?

-42 percent said it will be harder, 54 percent said it would be easier

Will the internet be dominated by the end-to-end principle?

-63 percent said yes, 29 said no

Will institutions/businesses take advantage of the Internet?

-71 percent said yes, 26 percent said no

Will reading, writing and knowledge improve?

-69 percent said yes

Rainie said the Internet will no longer be so much of a mystery in the coming years since more and more people will have access and it will become more of a normal part of life.

“The technology becomes most important when it becomes invisible,” Rainie said.

-by Laura Smith

ADDITIONAL DETAILS FROM THIS EVENT…
Video and more written FutureWeb coverage:
http://bit.ly/imaginingtheinternet

FutureWeb YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Futureweb2010#p/u

Flickr photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/38539612@N02/sets/72157623891937652/

Imagining the Internet Center born out of people’s Web predictions in the ’90s

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, approached Elon University professors Janna Anderson and Connie Book in 2000 to propose a challenge: Do some research to find 20 “kooky, out there” predictions that were made about the Internet in the early 1990s.

As Book and Anderson embarked on their research, it became clear that there was much more to these predictions than they had expected.

“We started looking into what people were saying, and they were saying profound things,” said Anderson, now director of the Imagining the Internet Center. “They were very prescient. They were looking ahead, tackling vital issues we would face in the years to come, and we really couldn’t find 20 ‘kooky’ predictions.”

What started as an engaging project to identify some “out-there” predictions led to a gathering of more than 4,000 predictions from the early 1990s. After publishing this information online in a searchable database, Anderson analyzed trends in the predictions and gathered those insights into the book Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives.

Rainie and Anderson saw the importance of asking highly engaged Internet stakeholders to assess the potential future of the Internet in order to inform policy, identify key issues and work toward the best future possible. They instituted a series of “Future of the Internet” surveys, continuing to collect people’s visions of the future.

The surveys are posted on the Pew Internet & American Life Project site and on Imagining the Internet, which has grown to encompass a vast repository of written and video documentation of people’s thoughts about the Internet today and tomorrow.

Anderson and Rainie have also published books based on the survey data. The “Future of the Internet” book series includes “Up for Grabs,” “Hopes and Fears,” and “Ubiquity, Mobility, Security.”

Anderson said among the top issues that stand out are the future of privacy, ownership, openness and security. “Most experts agree that the future of copyright, of the ownership of information is a very big question,” she said. “Many are concerned about law – about the future of property, privacy, there are a lot of legal questions out there that are still being defined.”

Anderson noted that younger people are more likely to have a different take on ownership and privacy issues than those who lived most of their lives in pre-Internet times. She said that industrial-age institutions – including governments, education and media and entertainment corporations, to name a few – are struggling with the new economic, social and political paradigms the Internet presents, and this leads to conflicts. She added that the struggle to balance privacy issues with security concerns is one of the largest of these.

The results of the fourth Imagining the Internet survey will be released in the spring and will be discussed by Rainie at the FutureWeb conference in Raleigh, NC, April 28-30.

Play the video to hear about some of the “kooky” predictions and also some of the most prominent predictors in the early 1990s.

For more on the Imagining the Internet center:
http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org

-By Kirsten Bennett

FutureWeb 2010 conference boasts top names and interactive event

The Raleigh Convention Center will be the hub of technology buzz at the end of April as the FutureWeb conference, co-located with the international WWW2010 conference, hosts top Internet experts and entrepreneurs. FutureWeb, April 28-30, is being led by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center.

FutureWeb is bringing “smart people together to discuss future possibilities in order to be able to work toward the best future possible,” according to conference organizer Janna Anderson, director of Imagining the Internet.

The event will host Internet experts including Vint Cerf, danah boyd, Marc Rotenberg, Lee Rainie, Doc Searls, Chris DiBona, Michael Tiemann and Bob Young, among others who will lead discussions on the future of privacy, core values, web analytics and the media, to name a few.

Anderson said keynote speakers were chosen for their record of innovations their record of innovations with regards to the Internet: “Vint with his work with Google, his invention of the Internet protocol, Bob with his amazing innovation with Red Hat, and now with Lulu, which is a fantastic new publishing paradigm, and danah with her research into social networks and how they are changing our lives profoundly.”

Attendees will do more than just see these keynoters, however. They will interact with them. Anderson is expecting that participants in the conference will actively think ahead about the future of the Web even before the conference begins, arriving ready to participate in focused and valuable discussions of the trends that are likely to effect the social, political and economic future.

“It is going to be a highly participatory conference, that’s what collective intelligence is all about,” she said. “We are going to have a lot of smart people in the room, not just the people in the front of the room, but also involving the audience as much as possible; I don’t even want to call them ‘the audience,’ because everyone there will be equal as far as what they have to share and give,” she said.

The conference is targeted at business leaders, technology experts, marketers and students alike, and the conference’s low cost, with access for many set at less than $100, makes it a valuable event whether participants come for all three days or just one, Anderson added.

“This conference is for everyone, literally everyone can come, and that’s what we want to see,” she said. “We hope to have a very diverse group of participants who are interested in a lot of things,” Anderson said, adding that the FutureWeb conference, “cuts across all disciplines, it cuts across all interests, and it’s all about us as people moving forward with this amazing communications tool – where we’re going with it, what we’re doing and the positive and negative aspects that we can see in years ahead and how we are going to deal with those.”

Play the videos to hear what Janna Anderson has to say about FutureWeb and why the Raleigh Convention Center was selected for the event.

- By Kirsten Bennett