Expert Predictions: Better Internet Communication, No Jetpacks

I spend too much time on social network sites.  Just ask my wife, or some of my friends who wonder if I need an intervention. JoAnna (who has the patience of a saint; ask any one of my friends) wonders why, when we are sitting next to each other on the computer, she has to type her response to one of my status updates instead of just responding to it verbally (Sigh.  Because if you just SAY it, then it doesn’t REGISTER as a comment).

An underlying message I receive is that while Facebook isn’t  necessarily bad,  perhaps I could be use the time more productively, such as having an honest-to-goodness conversation with my wife.  Conversation?  Can you download an app for that?

I did feel a bit vindicated, though, when I read the results of the latest Pew Internet/Elon University’s project “Imaging the Internet” where they ask experts to project themselves 10 years into the future and imagine what effect the Internet will have on society.  As an aside, I am a day-to-day kind of guy and have a hard time imagining how life will change 10 days from now, much less 10 years. The most recent study examined the future of social relations.  The study was based on 895 “technology stakeholders”, 371 of them experts from government, business and academia that made early predictions about the future of the Internet (people like Howard Rheingold, Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor) and 524 schmoes like me who are recommended by a expert or get the Pew Internet e-mail updates.

The Pew Internet/Elon study found that 85 percent of experts, looking back from the year 2020  and considering their personal friends, marriage and other relationships, see that the Internet was a mostly positive force on their social world.  These Internet utopians noted that e-mail, social networks, blogs and other social tools reduce the time and effort to communicate with people, making it easier to create, cultivate and continue social relationships. Social network tools allow people to build larger social networks and  learn more about those in those networks.

As David Moskowitz, principal consultant at Productivity Solutions, Inc., and lead editor of OS/2 Warp Unleashed, noted, “The internet is communications gold mine. We can already find people with whom we’ve lost contact, communicate with people independent of time zones, hold simple video conversations, instant-message people. It already allows us to communicate in new ways. The trend I see only improves with time!”

Both critics and supports of social networks sites noted negatives: Time spent online reduces time spent with important face-to-face relationships; the internet fosters primarily shallow relationships and exposes private information; the internet allows people to  limit  their exposure to new ideas; and the internet is being used to breed intolerance.

Eric James, president of the James Preservation Trust, indicated, “The enemies of social connectivity are silence, disengagement, distance, and abandonment. In the past, how many individuals and families have suffered from these degenerative influences? Now we have the internet.”

Respondents also imagine news technologies to be able to communicate more effectively such as holographic displays with the bandwidth to carry them as well as highly trusted and secure systems such a quantum/biometrics security (which, I think, is using encryption and finger prints and retinal scans to identify people). I am always dubious about future predictions.  I clearly remember that by now we were all supposed to travel by personal jetpacks.  UT grad student Brian reminded me that one of the coolest-named bands to come along in some time is “We Were Promised Jetpacks.”  You can listen to them here.

I am interested in hearing what you think.  Do you really think people can project themselves 10 years in the future and explain what happened communication-wise during those intervening years? What do you think about the prediction that on whole, the positives of social connections through the Internet will outweigh the negatives? Am I only one peeved that we DON’T have personal jetpacks?