Imagining the Internet in 2020

According to technology experts and stakeholders, the social positives of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade.

They say this is because e-mail, social networks, and other online tools offer ‘low-friction’ opportunities to engender, enhance, and rediscover ties that make a difference in people’s lives; they lower or remove traditional communications constraints of cost, geography, and time; and they inspire the type of open information sharing that brings people together, allowing them to find common ground and leading to more social integration.

From the report’s comments from respondents, here are 10 predictions about how the Internet will affect social relations by the year 2020 (summary by alexandrasamuel:

1. Social needs will dominate: “Humans are hardwired to connect and relate on a personal level. They need social validation and group membership. Technology and internet use will support people’s interpersonal and social goals because social needs dominate all others.” — Pamela Rutledge
2. You’ll have to face your friends’ secrets: “It will be particularly interesting to see how we reconcile things about the people we know that we had not known in the past, or could not have known. How many of our friends will in some sense ‘come out of the closet’ on some issue or other by joining a group on Facebook, for instance, that might make us upset or angry, and what we will we do with that knowledge?” — Steve Jones
3. Shy people will catch a break: “The internet breaks the shyness barrier in the beginning stage of every relationship.” — Jorge Alberto Castañoso
4. We’ll start to recover from suburban isolation: “The internet is best seen as a reconfiguration of space. The internet modifies traditional space so that existing places are extended in ways that allow us to stay aware, share and intersect with people with whom we are not in the same traditional space. The internet is the opposite of suburbanization: suburbs took us away from other people and locked us into houses; the internet opens a door from the house into a potentially shared place…The internet replaced lack of physical presence with social presence.” — Zeynep Tufekci
5. The further apart you are, the better the Internet will work for you: “The internet’s effect on relationships is paradoxical. It strengthens our relationships with distant friends and relations through social networks and email, but may damage the relationships of those nearer to us as always-on technologies and applications eat into family and social time.” — Mary Joyce
6. You’ll spend more time with the people you care about most….: “By the year 2020 we will have figured out the best use of social networks: liberating people from offices. We can better use it to facilitate work relationships so that people might spend more time in the physical presence of the people they love, or, at very least, in the company of clients rather than in the company of superiors…There’s no reason why social networks can’t replace offices, but a Twitter feed will never replace family, a neighbor, a real community. ” — Patrick Tucker
7. …but you’ll struggle to be present with them: “By 2020, the idea of turning off technology is going to be the equivalent of trying to stay dry when you are underwater. And I think relationships require uninterrupted time. They require being present. They require attention. And the more immersive our world will be by 2020, the negative result of this constant interruption with people we truly care about will be only harder as we are pulled in even more directions.” — Tiffany Shlain
8. We’ll stop looking at the Internet’s impacts as before-and-after: “Personal predilections will be enhanced once one goes online. Those who are social will become more so, that is, and those who are loners will deepen their solitude. I expect research on this question to show something different over time. The early question had to do with the question of whether there were changes in the behavior of individuals when they went online. Now that digital natives begin and continue online, this is no longer a meaningful variable.” – Sandra Braman
9. We’ll stop thinking about the social impact of the Internet per se:“The tension between the net and social engagement will vaporize in much the same way that thoughts about the telephone network vaporized and it came to be taken-for-granted. People do not ask if the telephone is an alienating social force. The phone is a utility supporting social life. Likewise, the net will come to be assumed as a utility for social life. How else would I know when church starts, when the game begins, where we are meeting for drinks, or what the weather for our trip might be?”— Robert Cannon
10. We’ll see online friendship as legitimate: “My guess is that people who only make friends in person will be seen as socially handicapped.” — Charlie Martin

Source: Imagining the Internet