an overview of the future of internet

Several trends will shape the next ten years: the extension of the Internet beyond the PC to reach the sensors, actuators and other embedded computers, the continued incorporation of on-line information into sectors of society, and the completion of the "always connected, anywhere" transformation of society ? A major debate over the next 10 years will be the struggle over who owns and controls the knowledge of where people are. "Location-aware" computing can be a lifesaver, or a tool for delivery of new sorts of spam and advertising.The Internet will ? have a large impact on police agencies, as organized crime and terrorist groups leverage the Internet to victimize millions. By the end of the decade, losses from Internet-related crime and terror will exceed losses from all natural disasters.The Internet won't change most institutions and human endeavors too much, because it's increasingly a cesspool of spam, porn, phishing and other distracting and annoying commodities, discouraging more intensive and productive use.The whole concept of the media, what is news, who produces it, and why, will continue to change. This will greatly shape politics, public opinion, and social activism - for both the bad and the good.There's almost no limit to the potential for change. Publications and information-based industries have already been radically transformed, and more traditional industries are seeing their information-based components moved entirely online.Soon being offline will not be an option. As more and more people get on the Internet, more businesses will be there to provide services and to troll for customers. There will be huge demand for: security, wireless access and entertainment. Advertisers will continue to flee print and broadcast media, fracturing that market and forcing them into niches. When everything is available to everyone at the same time there will be no dominant killer-advertising channel.The military, health and medicine, and education will change the most, primarily because each area (a) has strong economic/social/political pressures that will drive change, (b) are relatively cohesive institutions that are capable of executing on strategic change. I expect wireless networking and de-centralization and more participation/control from the grassroots will be at the heart of a lot of change.The Internet has already revolutionized the way educational institutions work (how we conduct research, how classes are taught, etc). The workplace has been profoundly impacted by the net: written memos gave way to email messages, non-colocated team members keep in touch every day through email and instant messaging. News institutions are a bit lost as they start to figure out what to make of bloggers and their newfound power to impact readers.Several institutions and human endeavors have already leapt ahead in using the Internet (families have been significantly impacted in terms of generational use of the Internet and what it enables e.g. IM; workplace environments are impacted in terms of the Internet, but more likely to be impacted in terms of extranets and intranets). Other institutions are slower to adapt new technologies that are developed as a result of the internet - take for example the adoption of DOI by the publishing industry, or even the ability to have an integrated patient record in the medical field. What the Internet enables will impact all groups - some groups are slower to adopt technology than others. It is also important to take into account the trends in the intranet, extranet and other communication-based technologies. The most change listed is media/news. The application that will make the most change is RSS. Previously, the news website, even though virtual, carried significant value to the individual seeking information. Individuals were not apt to go to multiple sites to get diversity of news. They will continue to not go to multiple sites, but with RSS diversity of news will be brought to them. This has almost the greatest potential for radical change. All of a sudden, small publishers will have compelling means for distribution. But the RSS readers have to get better.[Key things will be] anything concerning intellectual property and information dissemination, marketing, consumer expectations and interactions with products, brands and entertainment - who can publish/disseminate content - and what that content will be.The assumption that there is ''a'' internet is fascinating. I look at the recent takeover of the Orkut.com site by Brazilians as the most exciting thing happening. It demonstrates how with more people able to participate in ICTs that it will no longer be limited to English and upper-middle-class uses and values.The scope and speed of the global economy as well as its regulating mechanisms will create a data tidal wave that will overwhelm existing comprehension mechanisms. Entirely new technologies and societal coping mechanisms will need to be developed to process data into information (and who knows if wisdom will follow).The impact of the Internet on today is not understood and we are witnessing the birth of 4th-generation computing. The invisible network revolution. Evolution of the relationship of human and machine? from centralized to decentralized to distributed to morphological structures. Hybrid networks that evolve. Structures that evolve. The Internet has [been] and is changing the flow of people, capital and information, thereby introducing structural transformations in the institutional fabric of the world. We are talking about an evolution of cyberspace and the relation between the virtual and the physical and the logical. Birth of new worlds, new languages, new processes, techniques and knowledge. The birth of the Cybernetic Age and the death of notions of industrial and information ages. The Info Age is part and parcel to the Industrial Age. Industrial and Information Ages are about knowledge accretion. Cybernetics is about transdisciplinarity, process automation and convergence and knowledge creation. We are on the verge of a new renaissance. Science, art and design! Architects of the future will understand the Internet as the platform for a global youth boom. We no longer can see generations in the same light and driven by segmented histories. The global Youth Movement is networked, cross-disciplinary, cognitively unique and it is about creating the world we live in... The world we are projecting forward... Our world. Their world. We are immigrants to the future. It's all in our children's hands now.Communications is instantaneous and mobile. Society is and will continue to be impacted significantly due to the reality of the technology. The circumstance as catalyst making the impact realized may not have arrived but are present only waiting to be fulfilled. Education is probably the most impacted. No longer does anyone have to attend a class to realize a benefit to an education. Cost factors should be significantly impacted to making education available to everyone worldwide for relatively small costs.The most radical impacts will be in areas such as government and public policy as a result of information sharing among the non-elite. Opinions will be shaped by far more - and far less elite - influences than the fairly limited ones in the past, such as major media and government officials. The power of virtual lobbies will continue to grow. However, it is an open question of whether or not the financing for these will remain diffused among the non-elite or be co-opted by corporations or ideological organizations. The other key area of impact will be healthcare, as the Internet changes the relationship between medical professionals and consumers.We will continue to find new ways of connecting humans to each other and new ways to give over to technology things that humans do now.Organizations and functions that require large numbers of people to actively communicate with one another are more Internet driven than those driven by passive interactions. Competitive advantage among nations, companies and peoples will be among those who can apply future technology to their basic needs and infrastructure.Business will change the most as companies use the Internet to link themselves with suppliers, distributors and customers. Governments will be more responsive to their constituents. Education will be increasingly freed from the walls of the classroom. Physical presence will not disappear; in fact, it will be more valuable than ever, because people will not have to ''be there'' but will do so only when they choose to.In the next decade, these contributing factors: faster Internet; cheaper, faster computers; better mobile devices; better webcams, microphones; cheaper peripherals (printers, DVD burners, LCD screens, portable storage ?) will get more people to access the Internet in richer ways in a more affordable way. Also, China, India, Brazil etc. coming online will change the overall Internet user demographics. These ''enabling'' factors will have revolutionary technology advances in communications, payment infrastructure and information dissemination that will further improve efficiencies in various industries that have a lot of middle men, wiping out established players in medicine, entertainment ? Internet will improve the quality of life for a lot of people (affording more items) but will complicate people's lives (artificial necessities) in that overall life-satisfaction ratings could go down.The ability to keep in touch with non-local family members is affirming, particularly for those with young children and grandparents far away. On the other hand, the focus on the Internet in the home might further contribute to a disconnect from your community/neighborhood/family of place.The long-term focus should be the pervasiveness of the change over the next decade ... I see a two-pronged development for this change. The first is the progress of virtual presence from today's fictitious game avatars and 2-dimensional business teleconferences to a subtle, nuanced and authentic representation of people and environments. The second path is the provision of devices and real-time connections so that the granularity of reality is transparently overlain with a web of context and information.Within 10 years, many more devices will connect (and we'll think back to how quaint it was when we needed a ''browser''): in our cars, kitchens, phones, etc. The Internet will continue to be driven by people rather than be constricted by commercial interests. The Open Source model will continue to grow in popularity and ease of use, and we might even start thinking in terms of Open Source models. This would improve the efficiency and transparency of everything from government to commerce to interpersonal communication ? The most radical and positive change I can envision is the change in the way people interact with government. If public information, public comment, voter information, planning processes, etc., were to be overhauled so as to make them highly accessible to citizens online, it would go very far toward improving citizen involvement and taking the corrupted old-fashioned media monopolies out of their middle-man roles.On information Internet is increasing the noise-to-signal ratio, leaving fashion and false news a great place. On the other hand, new methods of securing the true from the false will emerge. The source will become more important than the message, as it is in TV. Relationships between individuals will be fragmented more than they are today, implying less commitment in most interactions. This will be balanced in the short term by increased value for family and close-relatives relations. Intimacy will not always mean physical proximity. The commercial side of web will be comforted in the long run.The most changes will probably be in the international/political and business spheres. The Internet has shown itself to be really useful to people seeking to bring information into otherwise tightly controlled societies, or to spread information and propaganda. Terrorists' use of the web to display their captives comes to mind. In the business sphere, I am seeing a slow but sure decrease in the need for face-to-face meetings or shared workplaces; as of this year, our organization is heavily using netmeetings to save travel expenses or time lost in getting to other campuses. CDC is also supporting more telecommuters, who connect to work via the Internet. This phenomenon is only going to get more common, and this is a HUGE change in the way business is done.The Internet has placed the power of information in the hands of the masses. While gatekeepers, such as big media, still exist and will continue to exist, the flow of information is much more free, especially as tools, such as imovie, have allowed people to create their own media. Entertainment, media and commerce have been most effected and will continue to be effected as people search out their own truth. From a cybernetics standpoint, we have moved from a hierarchy to a circuit - almost as if the structure of Internet is changing the structure of communication and society itself.The information-anywhere-anytime future we are fast approaching will heighten the divide between the haves and have-nots. Information is power. Governments also will be transformed by the instant reactionary and amplificatory effect the Internet has. Government adjusted to TV by polishing charisma over substance. The next revolution is already underway, and sacrifices substance completely to rule the infomoment.Person-to-person communication will be the first where various technologies (IM, voice, data, etc.) converge. However, there will be some negotiation of this, as some people like to be contacted immediately (cell phone, for example) and some prefer to answer at their leisure (email, IM). Spam and Spim will have to be eradicated or sufficiently curbed for this point to be reached.The Internet will primarily remain a tool of the wealthy (families, nations, etc), but slowly will become a mass media. As this happens, the sharing of information and ideas will begin to also increase.