The Pew Research Center’s Internet Project has published Digital Life 2025, which summarizes the opinions of experts: “Experts predict the Internet will become ‘like electricity’ — less visible, yet more deeply embedded in people’s lives for good and ill.” Jason Hiner of ZDNet has summarized the report in his piece on ZDNET entitled, “The Internet tsunami: 8 big insights on what it disrupts next | ZDNet.”
Hiner writes somewhat humorously, “The remarks that Pew highlighted from these experts include a little navel-gazing, fear-mongering, and overly-optimistic blather. But, the interesting insights far outweigh the drivel.” I have further simplified his summaries of each trend in these eight brief statements.
- The distinction between being online and offline will disappear.
- We will better understand the consequences of our personal actual and our interactions with others.
- The way we see the world will be informed by multiple views of what is happening around us.
- Society will be able to better deal with bad actors, i.e. those that do not conform to its standards.
- The relationship between the individual and the state as well as how states relate to other will change.
- The same forces that disrupt how people work will also improve how their work gets done.
- More powerful tools and
- The structures that determine how society organizes itself will change drastically
I retired as a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) in 2016 where I was Associate Professor of French and Instructional Pyschology & Technology. I arrived there in 1992 after my retirement as a Lieutenant Colonel from a 20-year career in the US Air Force. Most of that time was spent on the faculty at the US Air Force Academy (USAFA), during what I call my first career. For over forty years I have been creating interactive video applications for supporting language. The lab at the Language Learning Center at USAFA engaged in ground-breaking efforts conducted within a mentored learning setting. The lab’s work involved the development of technologies and instructional design strategies for the use of video in the language acquisition process as well as with architectures that support online learning and facilitate learning about learning.
I have a BA in Political Science from BYU, an MBA from the University of Missouri, and a PhD in Foreign Language Education and Computer Science from The Ohio State University. At the Air Force Academy I was a key member of the team that designed what was then the largest interactive videodisc-based learning center on a college campus. When I retired from BYU I directed the ARCLITE Lab, which was involved in the creation of online learning materials for language learning as well as video and interactive technologies for learning.
