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
