Poll hundreds of smart people about the meaning of onrushing connective technology and you learn as much about human nature as you do about the internet.
The Pew Foundation's Internet Project this week released some findings from its recent survey of 2,558 people and they show that some people are optimists and some are not. And some, like the New York Times' John Markoff, have metamorphosed from one to the other.
Said Markoff: "I basically began as an Internet utopian (think John Perry Barlow), but I have since realized that the technical and social forces that have been unleashed by the microprocessor hold out the potential of a very dystopian world that is also profoundly inegalitarian."
The summary of the findings is a good read, and Pew launches it with "Fifteen Theses About the Digital Future." Some of these are hopeful. Some are gloomy. Some seem unrealistic.
A neutral, anthropological analysis comes from Microsoft Research's Jonathan Grudin. His statement to the Pew researchers attributes no virtue nor vice, but notes that technology is outrunning human dynamics.
“The most significant impact of the Internet is that, by making so much activity visible, it exposes the gap between the way we think people behave, the way we think they ought to behave, the laws and regulations and policies and processes and conventions we have developed to guide behavior — and the way they really behave. This is happening in families, in organizations, in communities, and in society more broadly. Adjusting to this will be an unending, difficult task ... Are we built to function without some illusions that technology strips away?"
He could be talking about a chain of texts between people in a public agency, or about the unhappy discovery of a betrayed spouse. Technology helps the price of knowledge decline, but the knowledge can introduce new costs.