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.

Pew / Internet Study: Writing, Technology and Teens

On April 24, The Pew Internet & American Life Project published a very interesting document titled Writing, Technology and Teens. The study looks at teen "writing" in the classroom and the use of web based tools like text messaging, email and social networks. It's a good-sized 71 page report that I found personally interesting. I've had the privilege of watching my two daughters (16 and 12 now) grow up in a connected online environment, communicating with friends using various online tools and have made many of the same observations reported in the Pew study:

Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.

Here's more from Pew:

Teenagers’ lives are filled with writing. All teens write for school, and 93% of teens say they write for their own pleasure. Most notably, the vast majority of teens have eagerly embraced written communication with their peers as they share messages on their social network pages, in emails and instant messages online, and through fast-paced thumb choreography on their cell phones. Parents believe that their children write more as teens than they did at that age.

You may have seen Librarian of Congress James Billington's recent comments and concerns about “the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought — the sentence." Obviously Billington does not care much for these new ways to communicate.

Take a look at the Pew study - it's a little long but an easy read...... and...... I'll TTYL:)