So 12 years from now our work lives will be our lives entire?

That’s an unsettling thought. But if we’re always connected, always on the grid, then what’s to stop it from coming to pass? What’s to stop “the expansion of the work to encompass all time and all space,” as Nick Carr described it in his comments to Pew researchers. A reassertion of the same boundaries we’re seeing erased, I imagine. Otherwise we may have this to look forward to…

Said Benjamin Ben-Baruch, senior market intelligence consultant and applied sociologist for Aquent: “In 2020…a myth will develop that outside of formally scheduled activities, work and play can be seamlessly integrated in most of these workers’ lives. Employers will attempt to convince us that this is a net positive for people because we will be able to blend personal/professional duties…. However the reality will be quite different. Because we can be surveilled whenever we are ‘connected’ and especially because we can be surveilled whenever we are connected using our employer-provided devices, we can and will be controlled. Our employers will gain even more control over work-time discipline and over our lives and will be able to force even more productive working hours from us. Our lives will in fact be increasingly controlled by those who provide us with the devices that will have become increasingly necessary for us in both our work and personal lives as well as those who own and control the networks and network sites that we use and visit. Some companies will try to distinguish themselves as companies that do not actually use their power to watch and control us–but most companies will do the ‘fiscally responsible’ thing of using available technology to assert control.”

You’d think that in this age of social networking and Internet stardom, ego surfing would be a near-compulsion among Web surfers. But according to the latest study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, just 47% of Internet users have searched for themselves online (53% say they’ve searched for someone else).

Not as many as you’d expect, is it? Still, it is double the 22% that ego-surfed back in 2002. “Yes [the number's] doubled, but it’s still the case that there’s a big chunk of Internet users who have never done this simple act of plugging their name with search engines,” said Pew researcher Mary Madden. “Certainly awareness has increased, but I don’t know it’s necessarily kept pace with the amount of content we post about ourselves or what others post about us.”

Apparently not. The same study found that 61% of adults say they’re not worried about the personal information available about them online.

I guess Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was right: Nobody even knows what Web 2.0 means.

“It was very surprising to see just how small a group uses the full potential of modern information and communication technology and just how large a group hardly uses it at all,” John B. Horrigan, Pew’s associate director for research, told the Dallas Morning News. “I read and hear so much about people who write blogs and post pictures on Flickr and watch TV on their cellphones; I expected them to be a much larger group than they actually are.”