I’m taking advantage of the Christmas week to catch up a little on reading, and just went through Bruce Sterling’s final Wired column, in which he talks about how the internet is evolving and how we are entering what he calls the “post-internet” age, where the virtual and the actual are merging.
He references the recent Pew study titled The Future of the Internet II in which they poll 742 visionaries and technology thinkers about the effect of the internet on social, political and economic life in the year 2020. [the summary of findings section is a short read, 8 pages or so, and has some interesting quotes and perpectives]
Back to Bruce’s column, I’m sure he put a fair bit of thought into his final sentence:
So mark my last little act of prediction in this space: I don’t have a poll or a single shred of evidence to back it up, but I believe more good things are in store, and some are bound to come from the tangled, ubiquitous, personal, and possibly unpredictable Net.
I couldn’t agree more.
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