Experts prophesize the impact of the Internet becoming deeply entrenched in our lives.

Technology experts and scholars foresee a bigger role for the Internet in people's personal and work lives in the next decade, netting both positive and negative effects.

That's good and bad news for advertisers as well who will be able to reach a greater number of people online, but may suffer along with consumers if things go wrong.

On the plus side, according to respondents to a survey by the Pew Internet & America Life Project and Elon University: virtual classes will become more widespread in formal education, and anonymous, free, music file-sharing on peer-to-peer networks will still be easy to perform a decade from now.

Unfortunately, these things might come with costs, such as attacks on the network infrastructure and more government and business surveillance as computing devices proliferate and become embedded in appliances, cars, phones and even clothes.

The wide-ranging survey of 1,286 technology leaders, scholars, industry officials and analysts finds that there is a strong across-the-board consensus that the Internet will become so important to users in the coming decade that the network itself will become an inviting target for attack. By a nearly three to one margin, the experts in this survey expressed worry about the vulnerability of the Internet and the likelihood of an attack on the underlying infrastructure within the next ten years.

Some other predictions with which a majority of respondents agreed:

• Telecommuting and home-schooling will expand, diminishing the boundary between work and leisure and changing family dynamics.
• The dawning of the blog era will bring radical change to the news and publishing industry.

The experts were relatively unconvinced about two suggested impacts of the Internet related to democratic politics and processes:

• Just 32 percent of these experts agreed that people would use the Internet to support their political biases and filter out information that disagrees with their views. Half the respondents disagreed with or disputed that prediction.
• Only 32 percent agreed with a prediction that online voting would be secure and widespread by 2014. Half of the respondents disagreed or disputed that idea.

There were stark disagreements among experts about whether Internet use would foment a rise in religious and political extremist groups, whether Internet use would usher in more participation in civic organizations, and whether the widespread adoption of technology in the health system would ameliorate the most knotty problems in the system such as rising costs and medical errors.

"Nobody knows for sure what lies ahead -- and the history of the Internet has taught us to expect the unexpected -- but this group of experts provides the perspective of long experience. Half were online before the advent of the Web," says Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew Internet Project and lead author of the report. "Institutions that resist change, like education and health care, come in for the sharpest criticism among these information revolutionaries."

Here are examples of experts' reflections:

"Connections across media, entertainment, advertising, and commerce will become stronger with future margins going to a new breed of 'digital media titans' … Well-branded innovators such as Google and Starbucks have a chance to build all-new distribution models tied to ad revenue and retail sales."

"Health care is approximately 10 years behind other endeavors in being transformed, and will experience its boom in the next 10 years."

"Government will be forced to become increasingly transparent, accessible over the Net, and almost impenetrable if you're not on the Net."

"Digitization and the Internet make for a potent brew ... TiVo kills the commercial television format. Napster, Kazaa and iPod kill the 'album' format. In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes in their own reality show."

"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. The Net will wear away institutions that have forgotten how to sound human and how to engage in conversation."

"The 'always-on' Internet, combined with computers talking to computers, will be a more profound transformation of society than what we've seen so far."

"The next decade should see the development of a more thoughtful Internet. We've had the blood rush to the head, we've had the hangover from that blood rush; this next decade is the rethink."

"The dissemination of information will increasingly become the dissemination of drivel. As more and more 'data' is posted on the Internet, there will be increasingly less 'information.'"

The survey was conducted online between September 20 and November 1, 2004. It grew out of an effort by the Pew Internet Project and the Elon University School of Communications to look at predictions made about the impact of the Internet in the period between 1990 and 1995. A database of more than 4,000 predictions and commentary by experts is available at http://www.elon.edu/predictions/ and those who go to the site are invited to make their own predictions. The predictions from this survey are being added to the database.

"We were struck by the prescience of many experts at the dawning of the Web era about the way the Internet would affect people and organizations," says Asst. Prof. Janna Quitney Anderson, a co-author of the report and lead organizer of the predictions database. "It just made sense to us to go back to many of them and ask what they foresee in the next decade. And they see dramatic change in many realms -- some of it good, some of it not-so-good."

The Pew-Elon survey asked the experts to describe what dimensions of online life in the past decade have caught them by surprise. Similarly, the survey asked about the changes they thought would occur in the last decade, but have not really materialized. Their answers:

Pleasant surprises: These experts are in awe of the development of the Web and the explosion of information sources on top of the basic Internet backbone. They also said they were amazed at the improvements in online search technology, the spread of peer-to-peer networks and the rise of blogs.

Unpleasant surprises: They are startled that educational institutions have changed so little, despite widespread expectation a decade ago that schools would be quick to embrace change. They are unhappy that gaps exist in Internet access for many groups -- those with low income, those with lower levels of educational attainment, and those in rural areas. And they still think there is a long way to go before political institutions will benefit from the Internet.

Additional resources: 

The full report is available on the Pew Internet & America Life Project Web site.