Certainly any future prediction is difficult. After all, the future is coming so quickly these days and there are so many changing factors that you can hardly say anything about it with certainty.
However, no one can deny that predictions are useful, as they give us an opportunity to study the passions of the present. The Pew Research Center, one of the most important research institutes we have, last Thursday released the third study in its series “Digital Life in 2015.” Although it is considered a snapshot of the current situation, the new report entitled “Threats on the Internet” indicates a particularly bleak future.
The Internet Project, conducted by the research center in collaboration with Elon University’s Center for Internet Imaging, asked 1,400 technology thinkers. Overall, the experts highlighted the dangers of government intrusion on our online freedoms, intensive surveillance, and a lack of online trust. Most importantly, however, they pointed to the stifling of individual creativity that will come from corporate control.
"Personal" content
There are also many risks associated with personalizing content. This subservience to personal desires and needs as a way of limiting the excessive amount of information is also considered a risk for accidental discovery in what we read, watch, and think.
“We asked about the risks and opportunities of free content on the Internet, and we got all these important answers,” explains Lee Rainey, director of the Pew Internet Program and co-author of the report. “There’s a very palpable sense of horror and dread about what’s going to happen.”.
The “Pandora’s box” was opened when the team of experts participating in the study was asked to list the most serious threats to the effective access, dissemination and content of the Internet. “It cannot be a coincidence that the word threat is listed 57 times in the report, while the word hope appears only 12 times. The words corporate and company appear 31 times but only once in a positive context.” One of the studies studied the consequences it will have for the so-called “Internet of Things.” And these are usually optimistic prospects.
How much should we be afraid of what is about to happen next?
The survey was conducted online between November and January, when news coverage of Edward Snowden's revelations about the surveillance of ordinary citizens by US government agencies almost monopolized the news in various magazines and reviews dealing with technology issues. Experts believe that the furor created by Snowden's revelations significantly influenced the experts' predictions, while the fear of the commercialization of the Internet has its roots very deep.
Obviously, Snowden's revelations are changing the way we think about the Internet, although at present the revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) is monitoring what happens online do not seem to have changed the way we behave on the Internet. However, there are other ways that experts could think about the future of online content.
Most of the experts surveyed by the PEW Institute identify themselves as “North Americans” and take for granted that Internet content is something that is constructed by people and is personal, with an appreciation for diversity and free expression. As commendable as these characteristics are for some experts, this approach is biased.
“I spend a lot of my time in the United Arab Emirates, and people there might say that this ‘free Internet’ is a kind of subsidized oligopoly of Western cultural imperialism,” points out Steven Weber, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley.
Completely networked…
However, significant changes seem to be taking place in the Internet and its content, changes that no one seems to be talking about today. Experts seem to believe that the Internet is a “place” where people go or something they visit occasionally. However, as time goes by, this is becoming increasingly far from reality because many users visit the Internet from their smartphones up to 150 times a day.
Due to devices that recognize our location and wearable computers, such as devices that record certain indicators of our health and send information to the "cloud", they make our online activity vulnerable to prying eyes.
In the near future, it will be impossible to talk about human activity without indirectly referring to the Internet. Heartbeats, recorded with some measuring device and posted on the Internet, will constitute the “content” that will be created by the fusion of man and machine.
Obviously, this is a far cry from the kind of content and world that the experts at the PEW Institute revealed. And that is understandable, as is the fact that their predictions are about the present. The hardest thing to imagine about the future is that we won't be in it in some way that we can't currently imagine.
Source: kathimerini.gr
