Slashdot Mirror
Rural Mississippi: The Land That the Internet Era Forgot (wired.com)
New submitter lesedeuezghe writes with this Wired story by W. Ralph Eubanks about the efforts of the Extension Service to broaden its scope from mostly agricultural information to bringing broadband to rural communities. "In sleepy public libraries, at Rotary breakfasts, and in town halls, he [Assistant Extension Professor Roberto Gallardo] gives PowerPoint presentations that seem calculated to fill rural audiences with healthy awe for the technological sublime. Rather than go easy, he starts with a rapid-fire primer on heady concepts like the Internet of Things, the mobile revolution, cloud computing, digital disruption, and the perpetual increase of processing power. ('It’s exponential, folks. It’s just growing and growing.') The upshot: If you don’t at least try to think digitally, the digital economy will disrupt you. It will drain your town of young people and leave your business in the dust. Then he switches gears and tries to stiffen their spines with confidence. Start a website, he’ll say. Get on social media. See if the place where you live can finally get a high-speed broadband connection—a baseline point of entry into modern economic and civic life."
Truth is, the U.S. has a lot of wide open space that's sparsely populated - mostly by farmers or ranchers. These people are usually a lot smarter than most people give them credit for. They have to be, because it's so difficult to make a living that way these days. (You have to do a lot of manual labor, do a lot of number crunching, be versed in sales and marketing, and much more.)
My experience is, many of them are already well aware of the Internet and make use of it (even if it's only via a satellite connection). What they may NOT care about that much are "city slickers" coming in, preaching how their entire way of life will die out if they don't change (EG. conform to their ideas of how to modernize everything in town).
They're already adopting a lot of tech that the outsiders probably know little to nothing about -- but it's specific to their career choice.
Go anywhere in rural America and you'll find little to no broadband. I travel on my job to all kinds of small towns and cities. Right now I'm in one of them and the internet service is barely above dialup.
The same goes for cell service. There are vast rural areas of this country with really poor service or no service.
that most normal people actually care about things other than tech. For most average people, tech is just a tool. Most do not care about MHz, or GHz or dual- or quad-core or brand name. What's truly shocking to the younger techies in the bubbles of very large cities is that there are a huge number of normal people all throughout society who do not care about the internet and do not waste their time logging onto it - they get up, go to work, get home and care for the kids, then perhaps watch a little TV and then go to bed, all without thinking about the internet.
Facebook and Twitter are not required for day-to-day life. What Bruce/Caitlyn and the Kardashians are up to is simply not important. People who have jobs in small-town America simply do not need LinkedIn, etc. and going onto the net to look for Pizza is idiotic if you live in a town with one pizza place. Who needs Google Earth when you already know all the local roads you need to drive on to do your job and run the errands you need to run for your family?
I am not being a Luddite here, I personally live a life stuffed full of electronics and code and tethered to the web, but I have many friends and relatives who have simply no use to any of it and I am amazed at how internet-centric so many younger people in big cities have become - to the point of becoming completely ignorant of LIFE in the real world. This is at some level toxic to politics and national policy. I recall that when Obamacare was going public and the young "experts" were tasked with helping people in "fly over country" enroll, one of these morons told an older guy in the midwest to enter his e-mail address on a screen and was met with the question "what's e-mail?". This is driving a large cultural divide and that divide is going to become another political wedge.
It is simply an act of supremely ignorant arrogance to assume that everybody is on the net and that anybody who is not is some sort of ignorant backward hick - lot's of people simply know what's important to them and what's not. For every netizen who sees the non-addict as a knuckle-dragging moron (who is almost certainly automatically also assumed to be racist/sexist/homophobe/etc), there's a normal person with a life who sees a shallow, plastic, soulless zombie with an iPad and no original thoughts in his brain. For many, the remote, tabloid nature of the internet and its data-mining advertizing-centric vapid content is simply less important than the real world all around them and their families.
At the end of your life, which will you regret more: the time you spent with your spouse raising your kids, or the time you spent on the web looking at what other people were doing, or were pretending they were doing?/P
Challenge accepted. No need to even look at your links. There is Racism in the south. I don't think anyone said there wasn't. There are also gang banging hood rats in the ghetto. If it is racist for me to treat all blacks in the ghetto like thugs, then it is JUST AS FUCKING RACIST for you to imply that all white southerns are racist.
What do you think Dr. King would say about you painting all white southerns as racist? I believe even in the 60s he would have disagreed with that supposition. Personally I hate racists no matter what their color.
What do you think Dr. King would say about you painting all white southerns as racist?
Do you have the quotes where I said all white southerns are racist? That's the problem with the internet. You can't make shit up as easily.
Second challenge, quote where I said anything close to saying that all whites in the south are racists that back to me.
Hell, I was talking specifically about Mississippi, and some activites that occured in the historical record, and are pretty hard to refute, and that is hwat was in the citation links Not once did I say that all white southerns or even all white Mississippians are racist.
Bill Maher has always said that he gets some of his most enthusiastic audiences when he goes down south. In an intyerview with Mike Huckabee, http://egbertowillies.com/2015...
He noted just that in reading off a listing of some of his favorite places to do standup. And they are in the south. And he pulls no punches anywhere, so both humorless conservatives and liberals tend to hate him.
But the image that is projected from down south would make you think that Maher would be lucky to escape with his life if he went down there, given his politics and his mouth. So no- not all Southern people are racist, or social conservatives, or want to secede from the Union, or think that Obama is the Kenyan Devil baby. Or want to establish a theocracy, or teach creationism in science class, or repeal the 16th, 17th and 18th amendments to the constitution. It would be foolish to think that those traits don't exist in quite a few people though. Because it seems that people holding those values are the ones who get elected to political office. Want people to stop thinking the south is full of racists? Do something about it, not declare anyone who dares to think there might be some racial issues there as a racist themselves, even if you have to make shit up.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.