Pew Study: The Internet In 2020

A couple of weeks ago the Pew Internet & American Life Project released their third internet evolution report titled The Future of the Internet III. To prepare the report, Pew surveyed internet leaders, activists and analysts and found most believe portable hand held devices (what we all call "phones" now) will become our primary online devices as voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves.

Here's a list of the key findings from the report:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
  
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
  
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
  
• Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.
  

You can download a copy of the Pew Report summary here and full report here.