[1891] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Rural vs Urban vs ???
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Hughes)
Mon Jan 6 14:19:56 1992
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1992 12:17:45 -0700
From: Dave Hughes <daveh@csn.org>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Two anecdotes and an observation:
Professor Bob Shayon of the Annenberg School of Communications
travelled to Dillon, Montana (where's that?) about 4 years ago to make
the keynote speech at a conference on technology and information. He
observed that, while in the past centuries the 'center' was seen as the
New Yorks, the Los Angeles, the Chicagos and the 'periphery' was the
rural America, the small midwestern towns - in the coming
Information/Communications Age, the 'center' may be the online rural
Montanas, Arizonas, Alaskas, while the 'periphery' will be the old
population centers.
When West German Stern Magazine came to Old Colorado City in 1984 to do
a story on our online political activism centered on Rogers Frontier Bar
(both the virtual online and physical bar with modular jacks in the
booths, etc), they covered the entire story of the historical-economic,
revitalization of the neighborhood, where telecom and microcomputing had
played an important part.
We wondered aloud what the connection was between the online politics
and the neighborhood revitalization, for purposes of the story. Answer
from the senior reporter - Germans do not yet use computers like
Americans. They associate 'high technology' with the steel and glass
buildings of central cities. But Germans like their little towns. So the
story of ordinary Americans doing extraordinary things with small
computers and telecommunications in nice ordinary 'little towns' (Old
Colorado City is essentially a self-contained lower-middle class - not
gentrified - neighborhood of a larger city - Colorado Springs. Like a
town within a town) would be 'good news' to many Germans. They can have
their nice little (rural?) towns and eat their high-tech economic cake
too - because of grass roots telecom.
Observation: - since those incidents above, a third possibility arises.
That with every net being hooked to every other net - net of nets, that
the 'center' will be evermore online and connected, bearing less and
less relationship to physical, urban *or* rural, locations. And to the
extent that, and in step with, the accelerating pace of our economic,
educational, civic (government and politics), techological
'information/communications' life replacing our industrial-age
physical-work, travel, edifice-centered life, the center - of economic,
cultural, public, educational life - will become ever more 'virtual' and
disembodied from physical space. Already, it seems, that the world of
money is already more virtual and electronic than real (dollar bills and
paper checks). And almost every aggressive educational institution has
'branches' every where else.
The forces of 'decentralization' enabled and accelerated by 'everyman'
and 'every institution' two-way telecommunications have just begun.
