By 2020, the mobile phone will be the main tool for connecting to the Internet for most of the world’s people, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s latest “Internet Evolution” study. “The study asked a group of ‘Internet leaders, activists and analysts’ to forecast what they expect to be the major technology advances of the next decade,” the Washington Post reports. Two other interesting predictions concerned social tolerance and virtual reality, and the experts polled seem to have felt just as uncertain as the rest of us about what impact connective technology will have on human relations and social tolerance: “The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.” Their prediction about virtual reality lines up with teens’ approach to tech for some time: “divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.”
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