The future of digital research--oh, the humanity...

What will doing research look like 15 years from now? Well, I see two directions in which we could be heading. In the first, which I'll call the Shiny Happy Future option, researchers, be they experienced or amateur, would know to head to one of the thousands of worldwide multimedia digital libraries for all their digital researching needs. Those digital libraries, whose collections would be meticulously checked and updated and could be instantly translated into any of the world's languages, would be compiled with no agenda other than offering materials unavailable at other digital libraries in order to maximize the total amount of knowledge available. A convenient, easy-to-navigate index of all digital libraries would be on hand--perhaps bundled with all computer operating systems (whose developers, along with hardware manufacturers, cooperate with each other to the nth degree in order to provide the best possible service to consumers)--for all researchers to use, and both the index and the libraries themselves would be organized and cross-referenced in such a way as to ensure that not only do users find the best possible information on their topic of interest, but that they also find related topics and threads of inquiry that might lead them to other, more valuable research experiences.

The second direction is somewhat darker. In this second alternate future, the scope of digital research is even more constricted by the providers of the digital information, who collect and distribute specific information in particular ways in order to manipulate the ways in which researchers interpret and use that information. This would be easy for researchers to detect, except that in this future the relative ease of online digital research has changed the public consciousness so much that "the knowledge available online" has become synonymous with "the knowledge available," period. Advances in technology and the corresponding advances in digital library interface design would further convince researchers of the completeness of the information repositories. The same information, mistaken, skewed or not, would be copied verbatim and without question into any number of different information collections, and the consistency of the answers found during research would result in researchers acceptance of the most frequently found answer as the only answer.