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The World Wide Web celebrated its silver jubilee earlier this year. The PEW Research Centre recognized the occasion with a number of unusual and interesting reports, exploring the present state of online affairs as well as potential future for the use of this technology, say a couple of decades down the lane.
Previously, we reported their first survey study The Web at 25 in the US which confirmed the exponential growth and popularity of the internet in American Society. The survey found out many mind boggling facts about the use and the views of majority users, such as, the adoption rate of internet across a range of demographic groups. It also surveyed the attitudes of users to the availability of a range of technologies such as a comparison between the internet and television. The national survey established how great an invention the Internet has been, for individual users, through its findings.
The second survey report PEW center published was on the Digital Life in 2025. Over 2,558 technology experts participated by answering the open-ended question: “Good and/or bad, what do you expect to be the most significant overall impacts of our uses of the Internet on humanity between now and 2025?”
The report finally came out with 15 different theses about the digital future as 8 More-hopeful and 7 Less-Hopeful theses. The overall verdict of the report was that the internet will become so crucial for the users that they wouldn’t notice its presence separately in their lives. Instead, it would become more like electricity – less visible, yet more deeply embedded in people’s lives for good and ill. Many of us already feel that way about the role of technology in our lives; just imagine how intense things are going to get in just about a decade’s time.
As the electrification of society took place in the 20th century, it became seamlessly interwoven into our lives by the 1950s, at least in the developed regions of the world. That led to innumerable inventions of all kinds, from revolutionized manufacturing to appliances that have now become a part and parcel of our daily lives; such as, the television, smart phones, tablets, etc. This electrification, however, was incomplete in the under-developed parts of the world, many of which are still without sufficient supply of electricity.
The experts at the PEW Research Center agree that the internet is fast becoming “a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives. We won’t think about ‘going online’ or ‘looking on the Internet’ for something – we’ll just be online, and just look.”
People say, “Trust is a luxury,” but so is privacy when it comes to the World Wide Web or the Internet. As a transformative technology, it has its subsequent downfall of creating lack of privacy over time. The world shall reap many benefits by a ubiquitous internet life but also face serious issues of privacy because of being constantly recorded, watched, and tracked without them even knowing it.
How do you feel about “People being connected all the time in the sense that you don’t/won’t know what it was like to be disconnected; people lacking critical thinking and information literacy skills and being unable to manage their digital identities; new illnesses based on anxiety, stress and being connected all the time”?
The survey respondents feared that “People will continue – sometimes grudgingly – to make tradeoffs favoring convenience and perceived immediate gains over privacy; and privacy will be something only the upscale will enjoy.” This included the concern of democratic institutions and personal freedoms, in the light of governments using the technology for social control and politics. Another major concern was the commercialization of our digital lives, with companies and famous brands already predicting our choices by tracking our online activities. All of these things are happening at this very moment as the internet unfolds as an effective force of mind control; the best this planet has seen so far.
Kelvin Stiles is a tech enthusiast and works as a marketing consultant at SurveyCrest – FREE online survey software and publishing tools for academic and business use. He is also an avid blogger and a comic book fanatic.
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