A number of respondents to this canvassing about the likely future of social and civic innovation shared concerns. Some said that technology causes more problems than it solves. Some said it is likely that emerging worries over the impact of digital life will be at least somewhat mitigated as humans adapt. Some said it is […]
Many of the experts in this canvassing said power dynamics play a key role in technology development and social and civic innovation and have substantial impact in regard to broad societal issues. These experts highlighted the discrepancies they see in regard to who has access to power and who controls the instruments of power. Some […]
A number of the respondents wrote about cross-cutting themes, introduced novel ideas or shared thoughts that were not widely mentioned by others. This section features a selection of that material. Questions about AI figure into the grandest challenges humans face Michael G. Dyer, professor emeritus of computer science at UCLA, expert in natural language processing, […]
Americans and many around the world are not terribly satisfied with the state of democracy and the institutions that undergird it. Experts who were canvassed about the relationship between people’s technology use and democracy also expressed serious concerns about how things will unfold in the next decade. At the same time, the experts responding to […]
A number of these experts said that when people try to predict the future it can be helpful to look at the past and assess today’s trends. They drew parallels from the present moment to past eras and extrapolated based on current trends. This section includes comments about how the past can inform the future. […]
The expert predictions reported here about the impact of digital technologies on key aspects of democracy and democratic representation and likely social and civic innovation came in response to a set of questions asked by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center in an online canvassing conducted July 3-Aug. 5, 2019. This […]
Given the challenges of survey research detailed above, it is worth considering other approaches to measuring news consumption – especially when it comes to getting news online. One possibility is so-called “passive” data, in which respondents’ online activity is recorded automatically by a computer tracker. Several vendors now offer these types of panels: They recruit […]
Many of the experts in this canvassing responded that there may not be a great deal of meaningful change in social and civic innovation in the next decade. Some said they expect 2030 to be relatively similar to today. Some said there will be change for the better and the worse, and, as such, the […]
