Excerpt from The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future (Pew Internet)

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Institutional change surely will come, often starting at the periphery. There are market opportunities in offering services related to responsiveness, yet, big, traditional organizations such as school systems will be slow to adapt.**

“Ten years is too little for major changes. Efficiencies will of course occur, by automating more interactions – just as all became telephone operators, so we are increasingly all becoming travel agents, information managers, and so on. Small businesses will spring up that are more customer-centered and others will become more responsive at one level by some customized interfaces, but also more impersonal and less responsive to exceptional requests. On the whole, though, change here will be slow. Educational institutions will be the ones to watch, they are highly logical candidates for change, yet it is difficult to imagine much by 2020. By 2030, definitely.” – Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher, Microsoft

“There is a tipping point on the horizon between competition and cooperation. Scarcity of natural resources will require us to work together in ways we have never been required to before. It will take us a few generations to really see a significant change in the ways we currently do business, but it will come. This type of change requires us to plan for a long ‘now,’ which is antithetical to the way populist governments often work. Change will come from the edges and work its way toward the center. First, businesses will see the value-added new digital media provides in terms of access to markets and supporting quality interaction, distribution and customer feedback. This model will then be slowly adopted by government. I also believe the US is too big to govern the way it has been (thus all the red tape and claims of ineffective programming). Perhaps government would be more nimble as productive/supportive if it were to focus geographically (think Netflix or FedEx).” – Christopher D. Sessums, post-doctoral associate at the college of education, University of Florida**

** “This material was gathered in the fourth “Future of the Internet” survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. The surveys are conducted through online questionnaires to which a selected group of experts and the highly engaged internet public have been invited to respond. The surveys present potential-future scenarios to which respondents react with their expectations based on current knowledge and attitudes. You can view detailed results from the 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010 surveys here: http://www.pewinternet.org/topics/Future-of-the-internet.aspx and http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/default.xhtml. Expanded results are published in the “Future of the Internet” series published by Cambria Press.”

http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Impact-of-the-Internet-on-Institutions-in-the-Future/Survey-Method.aspx?r=1