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How the Survey Originated and Was Conducted
This research project got its start in mid-2001 when Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, approached officials at Elon University with an idea that the Project and the university might replicate the work of Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book, Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment. Pool and his students had looked at primary official documents, technology community publications, speeches given by government and business leaders, and marketing literature at the turn of the 20th century to examine the kind of impacts experts thought the telephone would have on Americans’ social and economic lives.
Rainie’s idea was to apply Pool’s research method to the Internet, particularly focused on the period between 1990 and 1995 when the World Wide Web and Web browsers emerged. In the spring semester of 2003, Janna Quitney Anderson, a professor of journalism and communications at Elon, led a research initiative that set out to accomplish this goal. More than 4,200 amazingly prescient predictive statements made in the early 1990s by 1,000 people were logged and categorized. The fruits of that work are available at the online site Imagining the Internet (http://wwwimaginingtheinternet.org).
Next, Rainie and Anderson reasoned that if experts and technologists had been so thoughtful in the early 1990s about what was going to happen, they might be equally as insightful in looking ahead from this moment. Thus began an effort to track down most of those whose predictions were in the 1990–1995 database. In 2004 they and other experts since identified by the Pew Internet Project were asked to assess a number of predictions about the coming decade. Their answers were codified in the first report of this effort, The Future of the Internet I (http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet.pdf).