" Your boss will no longer be the sole source of decision-making"

music to my ears. I believe management analytics is flawed today and is just as big of a threat as employee theft is in retail.

My question about social commerice is how will the social profiles benefit monetarily from social commerce, if at all?

"with deep immersion in texts and ideas being replaced by a new kind of skillful skimming."

umm, this is already the issue with me when reading anything online.

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, geo-tagged information is a big step forward... after that, indexing and filtering is "easy".

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.

An interesting situation, Mr R.  There doesn't seem to be any reason why there should be only one (primary) Internet indefinitely.