The one thing we were missing when it came to write this Big Report was a digital crystal ball. After all, how do you predict the future in a futuristic age? Who casts runes these days or pores over tea-leaves?
Instead, we did some reading and thinking, and reached out to some of our expert contacts, in our best attempt to visualize the World Wide Web -- and our interactions with it -- in the year 2022.
The United States will be on its 45th or 46th President by then. Barack Obama will be in his early sixties. We may or may not have a European Union. About the only thing that seems certain is that Vladimir Putin will still be President of Russia.
2022 is a long way off, but key digital developments are already in hand. The current explosion of mobile connectivity will surely exert an influence 10 years from now. Desktops and laptops -- even tablets -- may be hardware of the past, as we access the information stream using voice, gesture, and retinal displays. Immersion in this all-enveloping data field will change the way we work and think.
The displacement of information from devices will be reflected in the displacement of the worker from the workplace. Accessing the collaborative environment anywhere, anytime, a nomadic workforce will expect IT to manage the streamlining of data through virtual platforms.
As for social media, we're not going too far out on that unpredictable limb. Will Facebook (or perhaps a successor) swallow the Internet whole, locking us into a fully socialized online experience? Or will an adverse reaction set in, driving users back into isolated silos?
Of course, what 2022 looks like will be governed in large part by the political and technological foundations of connectivity. Big changes are looming, but innovations in the basic architecture of the Internet -- like software-defined networking -- could be overtaken by diplomatic developments. Member states of the ITU, meeting in Dubai this December, are capable of throwing international network traffic, and even the domain name system, into utter confusion.
The risk, as ever, is that the decisions that will finally determine the structure and function of the World Wide Web 10 years from now will rest in the hands, not of entrepreneurs or users, but of politicians.
Read the report sequentially, or click specific pages listed below. And please share your thoughts with us on the message boards.
one key factor has to be eliminated. 3 letters. LAG.
Otherwise a new disorder may be the result of the new technology combined with lag. can you imagine what that would be like? much more than just spilling coffee and unfinished thoughts spoken.
Well I went down the street to our new pizza place recently. Sitting out front was a guy and girl about 15 glued to their iPhones twiddling around. They looked up and gave me a dirty look for about one second before looking back down and continued twiddling with their iPhone screens. Internet in 10 years will probably be a completely dehumanized internet "welfare state" where most everyone has nothing to offer but a dirty look at anything human or real is my best guess.
That's depressing George, but I'm sure you're right. The consolation - and it's minimal - is that students are surely picking up alternative skills. They are very good at finding information and assembling it. But yes, they do not need to develop the critical skills to assess it.
That's the big problem with Wikipedia of course; not just that it's full of errors, but that users approach it in a credulous and uncritical way.
Thinking about what has changed and what may change, I remember that in my last year at school the English and History teachers were at pains to explain that the texts which we were studying, particularly in History, were not in themselves particularly valuable, in terms of our immediate educational needs. The factual knowledge that we gained from them would be largely irrelevant, it was material that we would probably revisit later when we were better equipped. The teachers' role there and then was to prepare us for university by enabling us to "read the big book", develop critical thinking and the ability to appreciate what we were reading, and then express the results in structured argument and in reasonably lucid prose.
I hope that over the next 10 years we will see movements and efforts to re-establish those skills or their equivalents in relation to digital information. At the moment I see none. Information - No need to think, it's all on the Net! Write an appreciation (the term was used for what I suppose could be called a critical study) - Hang on and I'll download one.
I suspect that the technology has outpaced the development of teaching methods and that a generation of school students are being disadvantaged by not being taught either the skills of the old technology, or how to deal with the new.
Mr R, you point to the potential for multiple "rogue" Internets and sub-Internets to emerge, some as walled gardens. That's a threat that could work against the vision of a powerful Internet described by D. Hagar below.
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The US National Security Agency learned the hard way that it can be dangerous to give a contractor too much money and access, with too little scrutiny. The NSA and other government agencies hire tens of thousands of contractors
a year to analyze data. Edward Snowden -- who revealed himself as the NSA leaker after fleeing the country -- was one such contractor, reportedly holding a $122,000 salaried position at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his departure.
Midsize businesses rarely achieve the same standards of security in their own datacenters as professional providers that specialize in delivering these services to organizations.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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