[Air-l] hmm, last mile, imaginations, and historical projections

jeremy hunsinger jhuns at vt.edu
Fri Aug 2 05:00:57 PDT 2002


>  If I remember well there also is a paragraph on what contemporaries 
> thought the telephone would do to rural communities. When you read 
> Claude Fischer about the introduction of rural telephony when it really 
> happened, Bell did not introduce it in rural areas as they deemed it 
> too expensive.

yes, i actually lived through interesting parts of that in my childhood, 
the installation and upgrade from party lines to individual house 
lines.  i think that changed the community i lived in quite a bit.  
cable made the same arguments about expense.

> And rural telephone coperatives used it not only for demanding grain 
> prices but for - chatting, singing together, a sort of self-produced 
> wire radio.

yes

> That is, the telephone through its strengthening of urban-rural 
> hinterland exchanges better linked the farm areas to their market 
> centers. And it INCREASED community life. It FACILITATED social 
> contacts.

yes, but that was, in the case of the the copper loop line a different 
thing a different type of telephony paradigm wise.

> But, you always have to set the introduction of a communications 
> technology into its historical, geographical, political, economic, 
> cultural context. That is, the real changes in rural America came 
> before: with the arrival of the telegraph which linked the grain and 
> cattle producing areas to the world market and made farmers feel the 
> price changes of Russian wheat or Argentinian beef. (So far for 
> globalisation as a product of the late 20th century, Internet etc. , 
> greetings to Castell).

i tend to think of globalization in waves of increasing amplitude 
vacillating though history driven by economies, nations, policies, etc. 
etc.
>
> So, my answer to your question is: broadband might change some aspects 
> of farm life. However, if you see the time budgets of farmers I dont 
> know where they can squeeze the time for sitting in front of the screen 
> for hours. But most people living in rural areas are not farmers.

right,  you have service industries and production, and where i'm most 
familiar mining
>
> And so we come to the different social and economic functions of the 
> Internet.  The possible effects of broadband should be differentiated 
> along the Internet's functions.
>
> Communications: there is no strong difference between dial-up email and 
> broadband email -> probably no broadband effect.

i beg to differ here, there has been a substantial change in email from 
ascii-text to some programs transforming the whole email layout into an 
image and just sending the image.  a good example of this is the apple 
mail program and its advertising.  if you are running on a 14400 line 
you probably are not going to be sending many pdfs, etc.  even at 56k 
they take time.  broadband changes this equation, and people's access to 
broadband in the office, at home, etc. has tranformed the amount of 
information and the form that information takes when sent through 
email.  a classic example would compare today's listserves with fidonet 
news of yesteryear(not yesterday's fidonet, it is still around).
>
> Information retrieval: I guess the most important intervening variable 
> is what sort of content is offered. Is there content locally produced 
> so that you know better what happens around you? I so, this will 
> reinforce local life, no matter if this on bradband or not.
>
> transactions: broadband makes quite a difference so this will make a 
> region more attactive either to go to or not to leave - the main reason 
> for inter-urban change of residence remaining, of course, a change of 
> your workplace, not the quality of the Internet connection.

this is an interesting part of it, does it increase opportunities, at 
what level, for whom, at whose cost...
>
> entertainment: a strong difference. Maybe it's here that cultural 
> changes will be the strongest. But for this to happen people must 
> already be predisposed having changed their values so that a new 
> technology can make a difference. It's not the technology that changes 
> life it's us who use technology. We already have a specific mind set 
> before its arrival and when the technology arrives, you realise that 
> you can now do something that you already found attractive before its 
> arrival.
>
> Social functions of a technology are not technically determined. Thus, 
> a social scientist might look at the actors that create their 
> strategies (if they have one) and see that in any given context it's 
> the set of actors, their coalitions, the resulting strategies, that 
> probably are the most important in determining the outcome of the 
> introduction of broadband Internet in rural America.

yes, one can do scot, epor, or actor-network, etc. here.
>
>
jeremy hunsinger
jhuns at vt.edu
on the ibook
www.cddc.vt.edu
www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy
www.dromocracy.com
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