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The Scenarios Were Built to Elicit Deeply Felt Opinions
The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University do not advocate policy outcomes related to the Internet. The predictive scenarios included in the survey were structured to inspire the illumination of issues, not because we think any of them will necessarily come to fruition.
The scenarios themselves were drawn from some of the responses about the future that were made in our 2004 survey. The scenarios were also crafted from predictions made in reports by the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the UN Working Group on Internet Governance, The Institute for the Future, Global Business Network, and other foresight organizations and individual foresight leaders.1
The 2020 scenarios were constructed to elicit responses to many-layered issues, so it was sometimes the case that survey participants would agree with most of a scenario, but not all of it. In addition to trying to pack several ideas into each scenario, we tried to balance them with “good,” “bad,” and “neutral” outcomes. History is full of evidence that technology adoption brings both positive and negative results.
After each portion of the survey—each of seven proposed scenarios and the question that was really a request to rank priorities for the future of the Internet—we invited participants to write narrative responses providing an explanation for their answers. Not surprisingly, the most interesting product of the survey is the ensuing collection of open-ended predictions and analyses written by the participants in response to our material. We have included many of those responses in this report.
Since participants’ answers evolved in both tone and content as they went through the questionnaire, the findings in this report are presented in the same order as the original survey. The respondents were asked to “sign” each written response they were willing to have credited to them in the Elon-Pew database and in this report.