The third Future of the Internet survey sponsored by Pew Internet will be available online for the next few weeks and is well worth participating in.  Participants are encouraged to express their views on topics such as digital inclusion, DRM, privacy and digital identity, and virtual and mirror worlds in the year 2020, and can remain anonymous or identify themselves as they wish.  It’s a stimulating and thought-provoking exercise, as well as an opportunity to contribute to a significant study on perceptions of our online futures.

You can also check out the results from previous surveys and a range of other internet-related resources; particularly fun are the predictions from the early 90s.  One that stood out for me was Eric Hughes’s 1992 comment, ‘In the world of the future, people will use low-cost Radio Shack equipment to spy on themselves to find out who they are': in the world of FOAF and Facebook fakes, we need to spy on ourselves to find out who we’ve been constructed as.  No comments about tinfoil hats, thank you very much.