The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new report out, The Future of the Internet II. The report is the sequel to a 2003 report of the same name, which itself was inspired by Ithiel de Sola Pool's 1983 Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment, a look back at what the experts of the time made of the telephone in its early days.

The Pew researchers asked a group of somewhat self-selected technology-savvy respondents to react to seven different scenarios, from whether a global network will even exist in 2020 to whether by that time we'll have "lost" people all together into virtual-realty spaces. The responses include fears of a growth in multiple personalities that will give rise to "cyberpsychiatry," that privacy will soon be nothing more than an illusion, yadda yadda. There's even the hope (I think) that there might come a day when every newborn baby is seeded with an RFID chip.

I skimmed the report because it was kinda boring and too science-fictiony for my tastes. But from what I saw, one thought.

What I see as the most likely turn of events isn't mentioned in the report -- that by 2020 we'll have evolved into ever more hardened and extremist sorts of human beings. It's, of course, a complicated and yet not all too original thought and I'll admit that I'm only going to scratch the surface of it in this post. The one mention I see in the report of the broad idea is this:

These technologies allow us to find cohorts that eventually serve to decrease mass shared values and experiences. More than cultural fragmentation, it will aid a fragmentation of deeper levels of shared reality.
- Denzil Meyers, Widgetwonder

But then again it's not so much shared cultural experiences that I'm interested in here. The days of everyone watching I Love Lucy or whatever it might have been are probably over and done with. It's rather that the Internet medium seems to reward most and just be better-greased for promoting the organization of people and ideas around similar, highly-structured, and particularly dogmatic world views. I'm thinking poltical bloggers, yes, but also establishment political reporting done online and even modern social networking sites like Facebook. Real life is fluid and squishy and shades of gray -- that's one of the things I like best about it -- but I don't know how well that's going to survive on the Internet.

Take the aforementioned Facebook. The ask made of college freshmen is to define their likes and dislikes, political leanings, favorite books and movies, relationships and even who your friends are for all the world to see. It might be too much, I think. Too rigid for an 18 year-old. It would have been too much for 18 year-old me, for sure -- at a time where I was just working to sort myself out, poke and prod myself to see what the future Scola might be, to then make the evolving me public to my entire social context. (Even if that context is just limited to my university -- in fact, maybe especially if it's just limited to that narrow little social field.) And to do it in the language and categories and drop lists pre-selected for me! Those were liminal times, baby, as they should be. But I don't know if there's room for people be liminal or evolving any more, at least on the Internet. I don't think that's a small deal. In fact, I think it's a very big deal indeed.

I'm too US-centric in my thinking on this, I know. And too influenced by my exposure to electoral politics done online, most likely.