There’s a great temptation in hard times to look only at the short term: What will work for the next quarter, the next sales cycle, the next big shopping weekend?

But the folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project know that the future doesn’t stop coming just because the Dow falls off the table, and that there’s always time for some smart long-range forecasting. At the very least, it can help clarify what’s really a priority in the here and now—what will really pay off with dividends when the roller coaster begins inching up again.

Mobile marketing has been in that “almost here” twilight zone for years now, of course. While campaigns that are aimed at mobile’s current demographic sweet spot consider the channel vital, many broad promotions see it more as an add-on to drive incremental traffic to a Web site or distribute coupons in a discount tactic.

But a published Pew forecast skips the is-it-soup-yet short-term guessing game and looks at what we’ll be doing with our handsets 11 years from now, in 2020. And what we’ll be doing is virtually everything.

As depicted by predictions from some 600 of today’s most influential Web seers, the Pew forecast concludes that by 2020 mobile phones will finally be our primary means of connecting to the Internet. We’ll also be accustomed to directing those devices by touch interfaces, voice commands and air-typing—and possibly by mental commands. And being easily and everywhere connected to the Web will blur the line between professional and personal time, potentially adding to stress and posing a challenge to family and social life.

The Pew study, conducted in tandem with North Carolina-based Elon University, represents the third time the group has tapped Internet gurus for their prognostications. Nearly 1,200 Internet experts, analysts and enthusiasts were presented with detailed paragraphs laying out eight possible scenarios for the Internet and its impact in 2020 and asked to “mostly agree” or “mostly disagree” with the projections. While the respondents could answer as briefly as they wished, they also had the chance to send back long responses explain their answers to each scenario.

For example, 77% of expert respondents agreed that by 2020 “the mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world” to get to the Internet. However, three out of five respondents (60%) disagreed that by that time lawmakers, courts, the tech industry and media companies will have solved the problem of copyright protections and stopped the piracy of intellectual property.

More than half of the respondents (55%) agreed that virtual worlds will become much more important in most human lives by the end of the next decade, and many who provided comment on the question thought this rise of VR will provide productive new opportunities for conferencing, teaching and 3-D modeling.

But almost 45% disagreed about the rising impact of virtuality, and that ambivalence was echoed in the comments. Some of the experts surveyed predicted that growth in virtual worlds might aggravate society’s digital divide, lead to increased addictions, or even foster violence and obesity.

And only one third of respondents agreed that the access to diverse viewpoints that the Internet can enable will make society kinder, more tolerant and less racially biased by 2020. Just bringing people closer in cyberspace won’t change their character, the naysaying 56% said.

“Not in mankind’s nature,” wrote Adam Peake, policy analyst for the Center for Global Communications. “The first global satellite link-up was 1967, BBC’s ‘Our World’ [broadcast of] the Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and we still have war, genocide and assassination (Lennon’s, poignantly.)”

“A strong undercurrent of anxiety runs through these experts’ answers,” Pew Internet Project director Lee Rainie said in a statement. “They are quite sure the Internet and cell phones will continue to advance at an amazing clip, but they are not at all sure people will make the same kind of progress.”

“The picture they paint…is that techno logy will give people the power to be stronger actors in the political and economic world, but that won’t necessarily make it a kinder, gentler world.”

There’s a great temptation in hard times to look only at the short term: What will work for the next quarter, the next sales cycle, the next big shopping weekend?

But the folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project know that the future doesn’t stop coming just because the Dow falls off the table, and that there’s always time for some smart long-range forecasting. At the very least, it can help clarify what’s really a priority in the here and now—what will really pay off with dividends when the roller coaster begins inching up again.

Mobile marketing has been in that “almost here” twilight zone for years now, of course. While campaigns that are aimed at mobile’s current demographic sweet spot consider the channel vital, many broad promotions see it more as an add-on to drive incremental traffic to a Web site or distribute coupons in a discount tactic.

But a published Pew forecast skips the is-it-soup-yet short-term guessing game and looks at what we’ll be doing with our handsets 11 years from now, in 2020. And what we’ll be doing is virtually everything.

As depicted by predictions from some 600 of today’s most influential Web seers, the Pew forecast concludes that by 2020 mobile phones will finally be our primary means of connecting to the Internet. We’ll also be accustomed to directing those devices by touch interfaces, voice commands and air-typing—and possibly by mental commands. And being easily and everywhere connected to the Web will blur the line between professional and personal time, potentially adding to stress and posing a challenge to family and social life.

The Pew study, conducted in tandem with North Carolina-based Elon University, represents the third time the group has tapped Internet gurus for their prognostications. Nearly 1,200 Internet experts, analysts and enthusiasts were presented with detailed paragraphs laying out eight possible scenarios for the Internet and its impact in 2020 and asked to “mostly agree” or “mostly disagree” with the projections. While the respondents could answer as briefly as they wished, they also had the chance to send back long responses explain their answers to each scenario.

For example, 77% of expert respondents agreed that by 2020 “the mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world” to get to the Internet. However, three out of five respondents (60%) disagreed that by that time lawmakers, courts, the tech industry and media companies will have solved the problem of copyright protections and stopped the piracy of intellectual property.

More than half of the respondents (55%) agreed that virtual worlds will become much more important in most human lives by the end of the next decade, and many who provided comment on the question thought this rise of VR will provide productive new opportunities for conferencing, teaching and 3-D modeling.

But almost 45% disagreed about the rising impact of virtuality, and that ambivalence was echoed in the comments. Some of the experts surveyed predicted that growth in virtual worlds might aggravate society’s digital divide, lead to increased addictions, or even foster violence and obesity.

And only one third of respondents agreed that the access to diverse viewpoints that the Internet can enable will make society kinder, more tolerant and less racially biased by 2020. Just bringing people closer in cyberspace won’t change their character, the naysaying 56% said.

“Not in mankind’s nature,” wrote Adam Peake, policy analyst for the Center for Global Communications. “The first global satellite link-up was 1967, BBC’s ‘Our World’ [broadcast of] the Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and we still have war, genocide and assassination (Lennon’s, poignantly.)”

“A strong undercurrent of anxiety runs through these experts’ answers,” Pew Internet Project director Lee Rainie said in a statement. “They are quite sure the Internet and cell phones will continue to advance at an amazing clip, but they are not at all sure people will make the same kind of progress.”

“The picture they paint…is that techno logy will give people the power to be stronger actors in the political and economic world, but that won’t necessarily make it a kinder, gentler world.”