The Rural Digital Divide
January 4th, 2006 by Christopher HarrisReturning from a holiday visit with family in West Virginia, I can’t help but be glad to be home. It isn’t that I mind being away, or miss my bed (though I do miss our cats), but rather I miss the internet. We have grown rather close over the years, the internet and I. Though I may look back on the days of placing the phone earpiece on the cradle of the modem and then dialing (and I do mean DIALing) the local bulletin board, I have come to expect a bit more in the way of connectivity. Amazing how easy it is for us to take things like cell coverage, broadband access, and even wifi for granted when they are part of our daily lives.
Then there is the Rural Digital Divide. This isn’t to pick on West Virginia, as I know the Rural Digital Divide is alive and well here in rural Western NY as well. I just happen to live in a town and am able to get broadband access (and pretty decent cell coverage once I switched carriers) so I can create my own connectivity bubble. My parents, though, cannot. I don’t mean they choose to avoid technology or haven’t bothered, or cannot afford broadband (another digital divide and a very strong reason for libraries with generous hours). I mean they cannot, can’t, no way/no how access broadband connectivity. Using a traditionally rural carrier and an external antenna they can sort of get cell coverage, but there is no cable, no cable modem, no DSL, no broadband. On a good day, they can get 26.4mbps through their dialup.
On the third or fourth day of the visit, after discovering that we would need to download a 50Mb driver update to get Civilization IV to play, we began to get desperate for connectivity. E-mail had gone unchecked, the aggregator was piling up unread articles, and this blog sat empty…but mess with gaming? That was a problem! So we drove over to the local Panera Bread, they who offer free wi-fi access along with a nice cup of coffee in front of a fireplace. It turns out though, that the local Panera Bread is, according to the person at the cash register, “the only one” without wi-fi. They get that question (and perhaps the disbelieving, panic rising response) rather often she explained. What about the local library? Unfortunately, they don’t allow downloading in the library. So, we ended up doing something else for the 7 hours (and multiple restarts) it took to download the driver so we could delve into a most excellent game (more to follow!).
My point?
- We take connectivity for granted – and shouldn’t we be able to?
- There are a lot of Digital Divides – and many of them are in our backyard
- $100 laptops are critical – but less worthwhile without $10 broadband
Why does this matter? If we can stipulate all of the usual arguments and reasons that we all know are so critical, I want to look at one I hadn’t thought about before. It is easy to see how the Rural Digital Divide is damaging to those who are experiencing it; I want to explore how this hurts us, not just them. if:book had an interesting post this morning about wikipedia, lifelines, and the packaging of authority. They gave the subject their usual in depth coverage, but I want to look at one fascinating argument they make.
if:book compares Wikipedia to the lifelines on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”. Their point is that when a contestant in the game show doesn’t know the answer, he/she has three helper “lifelines” to use as tools in the information evaluation process. The lifeline that tends to be the most accurate is a poll of the audience – a pretty random community/collective of information sources.
And that’s precisely what we do when we consult Wikipedia. It isn’t an authoritative source in the professor-in-the-booth sense. It’s more lifeline number 3 — hive mind, emergent intelligence, smart mobs, there is no shortage of colorful buzzwords to describe it. We’ve always had lifeline number 2. It’s who you know. The friend or relative on the other end of the phone line…With Wikipedia, this friend factor is multiplied by an order of millions — the live studio audience of the web. This is the lifeline number 3, or network, model of knowledge. Individual transactions may be less authoritative, pound for pound, paragraph for paragraph, than individual transactions with the professors. But as an overall system to get you through a bit of reading, iron out a wrinkle in a conversation, or patch over a minor factual uncertainty, it works quite well. And being free and informal it’s what we’re more inclined to turn to first, much more about the process of inquiry than the polished result.(if:book – wikipedia, lifelines, and the packaging of authority)
The Rural Digital Divide is crippling that information community and thus hurting the us. West Virginia has been in the news recently due to a tragic coal mine accident. Are the people most closely connected with coal mining and coal mining accidents able to join the information community?
- We must build a global information community – the Rural Digital Divide excludes too many minds
January 4th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Thanks for an excellent post on a crucial topic!
January 5th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Laura,
Thank you for the feedback. I know that this is a global issue, but sometimes when we start talking about $100 laptops in Africa, we forget that there are places and people in the “developed” world that could benefit from the attention as well. When you look at it on a global level it is much more distressing. People whose immediate human needs aren’t being met – food, shelter, safety – probably don’t need a $100 laptop in the short term…but that (and connectivity) may be the only thing that can save them in the long term. And it isn’t just if they need a $100 laptop, it is that WE need them to have the $100 laptop so they can become part of the global information society.
The new disinfranchisement may be the lack of high-speed internet connectivity and the power of information that comes with the connectivity. Want cheaper prices on products? Trying to pursue additional education? Need (effecient access to) government services? All of these and much more require high-speed access.
January 6th, 2006 at 12:33 am
Agreed–I think people tend to come down on the side of either hardware (e.g. Microsoft saying, “Look, here are a bunch of computers–have fun!”) or connectivity (“Municipal wireless will make everyone equal!”) when in fact both are needed–and needed differently–in different places.