WorldFuture Preview: Lee Rainie and Brian David Johnson Forecast the Next 10 Years of the Web, Entertainment, and Human Life

WorldFuture 2012, the annual conference of the World Future Society, is your opportunity to take part in the biggest discussions of our day.

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Lee Rainie

A man who “probably knows more about the impact of the internet on everyday life than anyone else on the planet,” according to the Guardian, Lee Rainie is renowned worldwide for his dogged pursuit of the Internet’s continuing development. In 2000, he co-founded the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, an initiative that produces troves of surveys of Internet use and the Internet’s impact on everyday life around the world. He has been the Project’s director ever since and overseen its publication of more than 350 reports.

He also teamed up with Barry Wellman to co-author Networked: The New Social Operating System (MIT Press, 2012), a book about society and technology’s ongoing co-evolution. And with Janna Quitney Anderson and Susanna Fox, he co-authored a four-book series on the Internet’s future. At this year’s WorldFuture Conference, Rainie will deliver a keynote presentation, “The Future of the Internet,” in which he will share the conclusions of experts on a plethora of Web-related topics: universities of the future, changes now under way in teens’ brains, money in the future, the significance of “Big Data,” apps vs. the Web, “gameification” and what it means for all of us, and what consumers should know about smart systems.

Brian David Johnson

Since it can take a few years to develop a computer chip, Intel Corporation’s developers need to know now only what consumers want now, but what they will want five to 10 years from now. That’s where Brian David Johnson comes in. He is the computer-chip giant’s director of Future Casting and Experience Research, and in that role, he guides company developers on how consumer needs will change in years ahead, and what kinds of new products Intel should try to devise to best satisfy them.

Johnson shares his future vision with the general public, as well, through writings and speaking engagements. He is the author of Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing, and the Devices We Love (Intel, 2010), in which he looks at the shifts taking place in TV, film, advertising, and the new roles that TV will take on in our Internet-driven world. Attendees at this year’s WorldFuture Conference will hear Johnson give an opening plenary on Intel’s algorithm-based projections of what human life will be like in 2025.