Forecasting is tough. The future comes at us fast today, with too many variables to say much with certainty. Predictions are still useful, though: They are an excellent way to examine the passions of the moment.
The Pew Research Center, one of the better-known think tanks, on Thursday published the third in a series called “Digital Life in 2025.” Even taken as a snapshot of today and not the world to come, the report, titled “Net Threats,” is pretty dark reading.
Pew’s Internet Project, in collaboration with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, surveyed 1,400 high-profile technology thinkers. Collectively, the experts posited new government crackdowns on online freedoms, greater surveillance and less trust online, and the squelching of individual creativity through control by big companies.
There are even dangers from the personalization of content: That customization, a way of limiting information overload, was also seen as a threat to healthy serendipity in what we read, watch and think about.
“We asked about the threats and opportunities to free content on the Internet, and we got all these elaborate answers,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project and a co-author of the report. Compared with the past, he said, “there is a more palpable sense of dread” about what may happen to life online.
This troubling view emerged when the group, many of whose members were initially positive about the future, was asked by Pew to describe “the most serious threats to the most effective accessing and sharing and content on the Internet.” It may not be surprising, then, that the word “threat” appears 57 times in the report, while “hope” or variants show up just 12 times. “Corporate” and “corporation” appear 31 times, only once in a positive sense.
Previously, a group of experts queried by Pew had predicted the effects of a pervasive Internet, while the other survey looked at the implications of the sensor-rich Internet of things. Those were generally sunny projections.
So how scared should we be about the world to come?
It helps to look at the timing behind the report. The survey was carried out online between November and January, when Edward J. Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency spying on ordinary citizens dominated tech news, which Mr. Rainie said probably affected people’s futurism.
“This is definitely a post-Snowden environment,” he said.
As for the fears that profit-seeking companies will limit access or exploit our lazy side, Mr. Rainie noted, “There is a chronic worry about the commercialization of everything online.”
Clearly, the Snowden revelations matter regarding how we think about the Internet, though so far the revelations that the N.S.A. has an eye on online life do not seem to have changed much the way people behave.
There are other ways that the experts might have thought about the future of online content, too.
Most of the Pew experts identified themselves as North American. They seem to have implicitly defined “content” as something human-created and personal, valuing free expression and difference. As laudable as those traits may be, to some critics this perspective itself may represent a certain type of present bias.
“I spend a lot of 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,” said Steven Weber, professor at the School of Information of the University of California, Berkeley. Where the Pew experts and these Arabs might agree, he noted, is “they also think it’s a place where the N.S.A. spies on you.”
To Mr. Weber, “‘Is the world becoming less free and creative?’ is overhyped rhetoric I’ve heard from the same ‘experts’ for the past decade.”
Just as important is the kind of changes to the Internet and content that no one seems to have talked about. The experts seem to think of the Internet as a place that people go to, or a thing they visit periodically. That is increasingly less the case, and not just because, according to the Internet analyst Mary Meeker, some people now check their smartphones up to 150 times a day.
Location-aware devices, wearables like health monitors that beam info to the computing cloud, and the sensor-rich world all mean that the habits of the Internet have blown out across the world.
Soon enough, almost all human activity and the Internet will be inextricable. My heartbeat, connected to a cloud-based health monitor, is content that welds the person and the machine. The video I watch is content, but so is where and how long I watched it, and what I did next.
This would, of course, be a far cry from the kind of content, and world, that the experts talked about with Pew. That is understandable, and why forecasting is really about the present: The hardest thing to imagine about the future is we are not in it in some way we recognize.