I think you are right about aliases being phased out in favor of real identities. If this will be Facebook Connect or Friend Connect or something else, I don’t know. But it will happen because the benefits of speaking as yourself will outweigh the benefits of anonymity. There is a reason that we are an ultra social species today, and that reason is that the benefits of being social and identified outweighed the costs and weeded out those who where anti social and anonymous. Would you trust and listen to somebody walking around masked at a party? The internet is no different from real life in this respect.

The time period of 25 years was set by the interviewers, and is in fact not the time period I’m really talking about in the post. What I’m describing is 5-10 years away. Tops. Trying to figure out what the world will look like in 25 years is beyond my capacity.

Just a quickie: the thing I noticed that started to lead to lets say better commenting on websites, less trolling and in the future what you would call better behavior is actually facebook connect. Because more and more people are less hidden behind aliases, they might begin to troll less. Of course that is gonna be around for a long time; but the easier it is for us to use our actual online identity vs create an alias (in terms of opportunity and effort cost), the more I think we’ll see that behaviour coming out. You know, using those manners mom talked to you about.

However, I dunno how long it’ll be before this environment you described begins to take shape. You said 25 years but, thinkin about it in generations — it won’t happen now, it might not happen with the kids coming up now, but maybe their kids? Is that then longer than 25 years out? What do you think? Just my musings…