Imagining the Internet of the Year 2020 – Shaping the Future Now
The Elon University, USA, together with Pew Internet have asked about 742 technology thinkers and analysts to give their opinions about the future of the internet in the year 2020. The site “Imagining the Internet – A History and Forecast” invites people to add their forecasts or to read others’ forecasts. The opinions of the specialists are to be found in a study, which shows the range of hopes and fears about control over technology and being controlled by manipulators, about addiction to virtual realities, where people might lose themselves or about world-wide access to information or about widening gaps and greater social fragmentation and cyber-violence.
There is a sentence in the study of the 20th century visionary and architect R. Buckminster Fuller saying that “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” And Alan Kay commented on this by adding: “The only way you can predict the future is to build it.”
This sentence is very true also from the spiritual standpoint. With every act we shape our destiny – as individuals as well as with society. And this holds true for the internet as well: We decide whether we use it for activities and purposes of good will, constructing better human relations, or by using the interconnection the web offers to expand egotism, despotism and misuse of money, sex and power.
