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 multilayered 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. Ubiquity, Mobility, Security: The Future of the Internet, Volume 3: Based on the third canvassing of Internet specialists and analysts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, this volume showcases the responses of technology stakeholders and critics who were asked to assess scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the Internet. Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total of 1,196 participants who shared their views. The insights garnered in the study included predictions made on the role and importance of mobile devices, the transparency of people and organizations, talk and touch user interfaces with the Internet, the challenges of sharing content while trying to perfect intellectual property law and copyright protection, divisions between work and personal time given the blurring of physical and virtual reality, and the "next-generation" engineering of the network to improve the current Internet structure.
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.
