Minnov8

If you rely upon the internet in any way for your startup, business, learning or to feed your addiction to World of Warcraft, you’ll be interested that Pew Internet has released their fourth report on the internet’s future entitled, “Future of the Internet IV“.

It’s a survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders which reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.

The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. In this report, Pew covers experts’ thoughts on the following issues:

• Will Google make us stupid?
• Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
• Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
• Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
• Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

“Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge,” said Janna Anderson, study co-author and director of the Imagining the Internet Center. “There are still many people, however, who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools.”

Yeah…like my former boss (now 69 years old) who insists that the internet is just a fad and that we’re destroying civilization with it. Or a former teacher I know who still believes that all relevant information we need must be stuffed in to our brains vs. looking it up via Google.