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2013 Video Script from Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center
Imagining the Internet: Hopes and Fears for the Future
NARRATOR: Imagine…
NARRATOR: Imagine how the Internet … is revolutionizing everything …
LEONARD KLEINROCK: No one’s in charge. It’s the Wild West. Surprising apps. Great opportunities.
TAN TIN WEE: The sum total of human knowledge can now be accessible by everyone.
NARRATOR: Imagine the future unfolding at a pace faster than we can comprehend.
DANAH BOYD: We’ve never in the history of mankind had access to so much information
so quickly and so easily.
VINT CERF: It rapidly facilitates access to information. It also rapidly facilitates our
ability to communicate with other people.
BOB PEPPER: In the pre-Internet world you were “always on” with your family and
your friends and the people you were with. Now you have that kind of connection with
people who are not just physically close to you in terms of proximity.
NARRATOR: We are rapidly evolving a global, immersive, invisible, ambient computing environment
with a proliferation of sensors, cameras, software and databases … in a world-spanning
information fabric known as ‘the Internet of Things.’
JANNA ANDERSON: At this amazing time of accelerating change a better future tomorrow can be inspired
by foresight projects today. How will free expression, property, piracy, presence, identity,
security, trust, economic development, human development, human relationships and human
rights evolve? We have to identify and address difficult issues and ask and answer the questions
that can help us best frame our future.
NARRATOR: The Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in North Carolina gathers
people’s projections - their hopes and fears about the likely positive and negative impacts
of disruptive change.
JANNA ANDERSON: We began Imagining the Internet in 2000, starting out by examining people’s
uses of the Internet and by establishing a database of thousands of predictions made
in the early 1990s about the impact of the Internet. People like John Perry Barlow, Esther
Dyson, Nicholas Negroponte and Tim Berners-Lee shared their inspiring dreams and they also
warned about the tough issues we face as the digital age shakes up and overtakes our laws
and customs.
TIM BERNERS-LEE: Nowadays we do so much on the Internet. We live our lives on the Internet.
We do … so much of our pleasure and our work happens on the Internet … that my entire
view of the world is now governed by the people I speak to and the opinions I listen to on
the Internet. So who I can connect with on the Internet determines what I think of the
world.
ROD BECKSTROM: Humans have always been effected by their environments, and computers and communications
are an enormous change in our environment. Psychological studies have shown that we’re
changing in how much information we remember. Our memories are changing because we have
access through the Internet to so much information that we don’t need to remember it anymore.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: We’re living in a world that changes faster than it ever has in the
history of our species. You go back a thousand years and you go through your life and you
never see anything new. But now you see something new every year. And we might be living in
a world where common sense can no longer catch up. Where it’s impossible for people to
integrate the new risks, the new trade-offs, the new socializations, faster than we change.
JANNA ANDERSON: Imagining the Internet’s mission is to explore and provide insights
into emerging issues to inform the public and serve the greater good. We have documented
experts’ expectations, hopes and fears on our website in thousands of videos, and hundreds
of written research reports and news stories. We have traveled the globe to question experts,
asking them to imagine the future impact of communications evolution. These projects hold
a mirror to humans’ changing lives in an ever-changing world of interactive information-sharing.
Imagining the Internet exposes vital issues to better inform our planning for the future
and it provides a historic documentation of a revolutionary time.
LYNN STAMOUR: Forty years ago, when history was ripe for change, it was a time for challenging
traditional models and practices, and – fortunately – the right people in the right places at
the right time took up that challenge and established the processes, practices and ideals
that underlie the Internet, in addition to the technological development.
ESTHER DYSON: I think the thing that’s going to influence most people’s lives [in the
future] is communications technology - one way or another, whether it’s the Internet
or cell phones - their ability to stay in touch with people they want to be in touch
with. And they’re going to have to learn how to filter stuff out rather than to find
things.
VINT CERF: It’s going to get faster, it will be in more places and accessible around
the world, it will go off the planet because there’s a new interplanetary extension that’s
already in prototype operation, and it will probably become part of an interstellar mission
that will probably be mounted sometime in the 2030 range.
NARRATOR: Imagining the Internet has many dimensions. The center fields documentary
journalism teams that travel the world to provide near-real-time reporting at technology-futures
events. Elon University faculty, staff and alumni have produced hundreds of multimedia
stories. These teams have recorded expert debates and discussions at the Global Internet
Governance Forums and at World Wide Web and Internet Society conferences. They were on
hand to record the induction of the first class of the Internet Hall of Fame.
STEVE CROCKER: We were all fairly technical and all of this was very exciting, but it
was instantly clear from the very beginning that there was an overlay on top of all of
this which was the human component. One of our early slogans was, “Networks bring people
together.”
RAUL ECHEBERRIA: All this has been possible because the Internet is a collective construction
and thousands of people around the world are working every day, adding bricks to its construction
and making the Internet better and better and more useful every day.
MITCHELL BAKER: To our communities of volunteers and participants around the world to whom
we try to give that spirit of, “You know, the Internet is ours, it’s for all of us,
get in there and make it ours.”
NARRATOR: Survey research is another important part of Imagining the Internet's work. Many
books and dozens of research reports have been produced, containing thousands of predictions
by experts. The findings of this work provide powerful insights. We are beginning to understand
the fundamental changes that rapidly evolving communications networks are bringing to societies
and to the lives of individuals.
JANNA ANDERSON: Influential technology innovators, astute policy experts and other people from
around the world are sharing their foresight regarding crucial issues we need to address.
We are documenting their optimistic expectations for great good to emerge along with their
frank statements that some negative predictable and unintended consequences of technological
advances could lead to a very dark future.
LEONARD KLEINROCK: The Internet, in my mind, has only reached its teenage years. That gives
you a kind of condition to see why it’s behaving the way it does, because it’s behaving
very badly. OK? It’s mischievous, it’s erratic, it’s unruly and it’s disobedient.
TIM BERNERS-LEE: The greatest fear is that it’s taken over by either a very large,
powerful company or country.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: The Internet can be used as a great tool for freedom, but it’s also
a great tool for control, and right now there’s a political struggle going on between those
who want to use the Internet for the people and those who want to use it for government
or for big business. My fear is that the powers that already exist will coopt the Internet
and not let the distributive power of the future arise.
BOB KAHN: The world is not a perfect place. The Internet is not a perfect place. But as
long as the positives outweigh the negatives I think it will be not only a good thing for
the future but an essential part of our infrastructure going forward.
NARRATOR: In keeping with the mission of Imagining the Internet, the center involves young people
in every aspect of its work. They research the issues, report on important communications
policy events … and, most importantly, in the process of their work they become informed,
inspired advocates for a positive future. The involvement of more than 400 students
over the past decade has been crucial to this effort.
EUGENE DANIEL: In no time, ever, have we been in such a global community as we are right
now, and we should be taking advantage of that every opportunity that we can.
NICOLE CHADWICK: It really opened my eyes to the fact that there’s a whole world out
there that I’ve never seen before. Imagining the Internet gave me the opportunity to see
that world and to want to go back.
NARRATOR: Free and open… a resource for the world… In addition to the thousands
of pages of research recorded by Imagining the Internet-dot-org, the center’s findings
are included in the digital archives of the Library of Congress … The website is listed
as a key resource by the Internet Society … Its documentary journalism is part of
the official archives of the United Nation's Secretariat for the Internet Governance Forum
and it is part of the official record of IGF-USA. Representatives of the center also speak about
their research findings in presentations at national and global conferences.
JANNA ANDERSON: Imagining the Internet is a mirror we hold up to our world, to assist
all of us in understanding the impact of the technology we are allowing to gradually insinuate
itself into our lives to a point at which it seems we cannot thrive without it. We have
to examine how WE are changing as our tools change. We must work diligently to identify
challenges and opportunities in order to make informed choices today to create the future
we want… If we don’t, we may fall victim to a tomorrow we never saw coming.
VINT CERF: I wish that the Internet could become a kind of historical watershed, the
beginning of global connectivity. This will evolve over time. There will be new ways of
doing this. Someday the Internet will be replaced by something else – better, I hope. But
I hope that trend continues and we all become a planet of people, not a planet of nations.
Special thanks to: the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, the Internet
Governance Forum, the Internet Society.
www.imaginingtheinternet.org – a project of the Elon University School of Communications.