Certainly any future prediction is difficult. After all, the future is coming so fast these days and there are so many changing factors that you can hardly say anything about it with certainty.
However, no one can deny that the predictions are useful as they give us an opportunity to study the passions of the present. The Pew research center, one of our major research institutes, last Thursday unveiled the third study of the Digital Life 2015 series. Although it is considered a snapshot of the current situation, the new report under the title "Threats on the Internet" indicates a particularly bleak future.
The "Internet Program" developed by the research center in collaboration with the "Internet Imaging Center" of the University of Elton asked questions to 1.400 thinkers of technological developments. Overall, experts pointed out the risk of government interference in our online freedoms, intensive monitoring and lack of online confidence. Above all, however, he pointed to the suppression of the individual creativity that will come from the control of the big companies.
Content "Personnel"
There are also many of the risks posed by the personalization of content. This subordination to personal desires and needs as a way of limiting the excessive volume of information is also considered a risk for accidental discovery in what we read, keep track of and think about.
"We asked about the risks and opportunities of free content on the Internet and got all these important answers," explains Lee Rainey, Director of Proletterof Pew on the Internet and co-author of the report. "The horror and terror of all that is about to happen is very palpable."
"Pandora's box" was opened when the group of experts involved in the research was asked to list the most serious threats to the effective access, dissemination and for Internet content. "It cannot be a coincidence that the word threat appears 57 times in the report, while the word hope appears only 12 times. The words corporate and company appear 31 times but only once in a positive context." One of the studies studied the consequences it will have for the so-called "Internet of Things". And these are usually optimistic prospects.
How much should we be afraid of what is to come?
The survey was conducted online between November and January when Edward Schoonen's news coverage of simple US citizens' monkeys monopolized almost news in magazines and inspections that deal with technology issues. Experts believe that the rhythm created by the Sounounden revelations has significantly influenced experts' predictions, while the fear of commercializing the Internet has its roots deep.
Snowden's revelations are apparently changing the way we think about the Internet, although there are currently revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) is monitoring what is happening online does not seem to have changed the way we behave on the Internet. There are, however, other ways that experts could think about the future of online content.
Most of the experts surveyed by the PEW Institute have been identified as "North American" and have assumed that the content of the Internet is something that has been made by people and is personal, with respect to diversity and freedom of expression. As well as being commended, if these are the characteristics for some specialists, this approach is biased.
"I spend a lot of my time in the United Arab Emirates and people there can say that this" free internet "is a kind of subsidized oligopoly of western cultural imperialism," says Steven Weber, an IT professor at Berkeley University.
Absolutely networked…
However, changes in the Internet and its content seem to be significant, changes that no one seems to be talking about today. Experts seem to think that the Internet is a "place" where people go or something they visit occasionally. But as time passes, this is far from reality because many users visit the Internet from their smart mobiles even 150 times a day.
Because of the devices that recognize where we are located and the computers we wear, such as devices that record certain health indicators and send information to the cloud, make our Internet activity vulnerable to prying eyes.
In the near future, it will be impossible to talk about human activity without referring indirectly to the Internet. The pulses of the heart, recorded with a measuring device and posted on the Internet, are the "content" that will create the alloy of man and machine.
Obviously, this is far from the kind of content and the world that experts have revealed at the PEW Institute. And this is understandable as well as the fact that their forecasts are about the present. The hardest thing to imagine for the future is that we will not be in that in a way that we can not think today.
Source: kathimerini.gr
