I'm curious what folks consider the definite (i.e., well defined, concrete) future state to be... Or what would you forecast?
At this point (I'm in my 40s, grew up with computers starting with the Commodore 64) I'd be okay switching/progressing to the internet not being so prominent. As a parent of a child with disabilities, the internet has made communication around medical needs easier, both with doctors and with other people in similar situations. On a global scale, beyond my family though? This speed at scale may be doing more harm than good to life on earth.
We're already planning to move back to a city (mainly for our child's benefit), and we'd never have left if the internet didn't exist.
"Definite future state" - hah, not even gonna bother with that one.
As for the rest? Passing fads, but also reflective of human social nature; we will always find ways to entertain ourselves. A more interesting question to me is what life on earth might look like in ten thousand years, and what role we now can play in shaping it in such a way that a person then, having grown up with stories about "pocket monoliths" that contained all the stories in the world, might with their rich imagination dream up this thread and chuckle as they go about picking berries (but not all the berries), weaving baskets, catching fish (but not all the fish), and all the other healthy* lifeways that have served us well for so long.
*Yes, I'm including violence in there, too (we're territorial animals at heart), just not the mechanized, industrialized violence that took off in the early 1900s
I feel like people are going back towards smaller scale communities, or even offline ones in general.
Tech wise, I don't have many predictions though. From what I can tell, the answer there is "more options open up", and that's about it. If you want to work with pure HTML alone, that's still possible and people still do that. If you want to work with Perl or PHP or Python or Ruby or whatever, then that's still possible too. I don't think we'll ever see a total revolution in what tech people use there, because no existing tech completely dies out.
I do worry about the job market here though. We've seen a huge flood of people joining the tech industry due to the salaries and appeal of an 'easy' life, and we're seeing more and more solutions that remove the need for a development team altogether (especially now AI is getting better). I kinda suspect wages are going fall rather rapidly at some point, and that the bottom end of the market might slowly start fading away.
Algorithms from Platforms will always filter out content that people don't want to see.
Facebook/Instagram will definitely keep increasing its MAU, but usage will drop and people will focus on higher value entertainment (think Netflix, real life experiences etc).
The fact people tend to use their Tiktoks and reels a lot, it's because they are poor or don't have anything more interesting to do, you'd see people consuming less, but still being active and doing whatever is new and interesting.
The "web" as some tech people perceive it and have nostalgia, like searching through a search engine to get to a page and content has been dead since a long time. Most people don't use that way, they use the internet through their phones and typically directly from Apps.
I predict that AI-generated content floods the internet, and that real humans actually use the net less because of it. Nobody wants to spend hours reading that.
The main difference between that and "AI" is that we're getting the "AI" promoted as the search results, as opposed to diluting the usefulness of the links.