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."

Comments

Not sure it matters, ultimately?

[King_TJ]

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.