About the series: Technology builders, entrepreneurs, consultants, academicians, and futurists from around the world share their wisdom in The Future of the Internet surveys conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University. The series of surveys garners smart, detailed assessments of multi-layered issues from a variety of voices, ranging from the scientists and engineers who created the first Internet architecture a decade ago to social commentators to technology leaders in corporations, media, government, and higher education. Among the respondents are people affiliated with many of the world's top organizations, including IBM, AOL, Microsoft, Intel, ICANN, the Internet Society, Google, W3C, Internet2, and Oracle; Harvard, MIT, and Yale; and the Federal Communications Commission, FBI, U.S. Census Bureau, Social Security Administration, and U.S. Department of State. They provide significant and telling responses to questions about the future of government, education, media, entertainment, commerce, and more. They foresee continuing conflicts over control of networked communications and the content produced and shared online. They also predict the major changes ahead for everyone in every field of endeavor. Hopes and Fears: The Future of the Internet, Volume 2 The 2006 Future of the Internet II survey asked its participants to react to variety of networked information technology scenarios related to national boundaries, human languages, artificial intelligence and other topics. Among the questions implicit in the scenarios were: Will more people choose to live "off the grid"? Will autonomous machines leave people out of the loop? Will English be the lingua franca? Will national boundaries be displaced by new groupings? Among the themes in the predictions: Continued serious erosion of individual privacy; the improvement of virtual reality and rising problems tied to it; greater economic opportunities in developing nations; changes in languages; the rise of autonomous machines that operate beyond human control.
Janna Quitney Anderson is an Associate Professor and Director of the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and she works as a research fellow for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. She is the author of the book "Imagining the Internet," (Rowman & Littlefield) and the "Future of the Internet" book series (Cambria Press). She is a member of the editorial board of Newspaper Research Journal; a reviewer for New Media & Society; and a contributor to State of the Future reports.
She is a lead author of Pew Internet's "Future of the Internet" survey and director of Imagining the Internet, http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org/, a Webby Honors-winning online compilation of survey studies and documentary videos illuminating the potential future of the Internet. This project, launched in 2003, has involved hundreds of Elon students in global communications research. It has created an amazing archive of thousands of predictions about the future of the Internet, many of them packaged in video format.
Anderson has written articles for USA Today, Advertising Age and the New York Times News Service. She serves on the boards of the Lifeboat Foundation and DiploFoundation. She earned her MA in journalism at the University of Memphis and she has been on the faculty at Elon University since spring 1999. Previous to that she spent 20 years working as an award-winning copy editor, reporter, and features editor at newspapers in Minnesota and North Dakota.
