Colleagues/ Pew Report :The Future of the Internet III / Dec 14, 2008 > The World in 2020: The Mobile Device Will Be The Primary Connection Tool To The Internet /Gerry Overview A survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves. They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives. Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020: 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. The Evolution of Mobile Internet Communications / Prediction > The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world. In 2020, while "one laptop per child" and other initiatives to bring networked digital communications to everyone are successful on many levels, the mobile phone-now with significant computing power-is the primary Internet connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world, providing information in a portable, well-connected form at a relatively low price. Links To More Predictions About The Evolution Of Mobile Communications And The Full Text Of The Pew Report Available From [ http://tinyurl.com/npljcy ] Enjoy ! /Gerry Gerry McKiernan Associate Professor Science and Technology Librarian Iowa State University Library Ames IA 50011 [log in to unmask] There Are No Answers, Only Solutions / Olde Irish Saying The Future Is Already Here, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed / Attributed To William Gibson, SciFi Author / Coined 'Cyberspace