MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Elon University has conducted bi-annual surveys concerning the “Future of the internet” with multiple publications on how professionals consider how technology will change the internet and our lives with it. These surveys have been completed by over 1600 people each year with a majority of the leaders in their technological field influencing the internet since the early beginnings.

Their research results have been published in multiple publications and have focused on summarizing how respondents consider the internet to look like in 2020 or 2025. While the results are well formulated and analyzed, they have not looked at how the ‘language’ used in those responses has changed on a long-term basis.

This is why I propose to analyze the qualitative responses of each survey, and conduct an unsupervised inference method called Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic (LDA) to discover what the most common characteristics of the discourse concerning the internet were during each year of that survey, and how those characteristics changed between the first 2006 and latest 2018 survey. The analysis can furthermore be expanded to find particular communities based on the types of words used when describing the future of the internet.