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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."
They know all about that series of tubes, and reject it for the porn-filled wasteland they know it to be!
Damn, talk about low standards.
While obviously written from the typical Southerners-are-stupid-hicks point of view, the story has this interesting quote:
Looks like maybe those backwards southerners aren't quite as stupid as everybody thinks.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Just make certain your of the right ummmmm, heritage, if you know what I mean. And don't shut off the car.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Damn it, now you've ruined the control group. Who told them about the internet?
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.
Unless rural Mississippi has some major perks that I'm unaware of, I'm not sure better internet access will really help those rural areas retain young people. Young people leaving rural areas is not a problem unique to Mississippi. It's happening all over the US, largely due to economic reasons such as the increasing efficiency of agriculture requiring fewer people. (See Rural Flight.) Unfortunately, instead of seeing rural flight as a natural response to economics, some chalk rural depopulation up to incredibly dumb Agenda 21 conspiracy theories, which I'm guessing most slashdoters haven't heard of but which some state legislatures seem to take seriously.
FWIW, I speak as someone who really likes rural areas, but I realize that it's not really compatible with the employment I want. The best I can hope for is living in/near a smallish city and getting enough money to buy a cabin in the woods for weekends.
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.
than I have now in Seattle. I had 15 Mbps cable in Mississippi, but only 160 kbps in downtown Seattle. While I have a few friends that have left Seattle to take jobs elsewhere with faster access, people aren't leaving in droves.
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
The internet will have minimal impact in the future.
People also need to realize that the future is analog, digital is on its way out. Eight out of my ten closest friends(aged 29-42) now refuse to even carry a smartphone. Seven of them no longer have any social media accounts(have closed them), nine of them use only fake identities apart from their personal email(yet only 2 or 3 use pgp so far), eight of them block all advertising(most frequently with a hosts file or on their router) and a grand total of one stores any files in "the cloud". Even five or six of them now use cash only when possible. Of course 3 years ago the numbers were quite different, but they are going the other way.
which is terrible, abject poverty. China double planted and starved half their population, albeit because everyone was too scared to tell Mao he was wrong. But the point is it's not hard to get people to do stupid things that aren't in their best interests.
You're right about one thing: their entire way of life is going to die. Privately owned farms are few and far between. All you have to do is wait for a dry spell, economic downturn or for junior to get tired of living in the middle of nowhere watching crops grow and you can buy the land out for cheap. And let's face it, we don't need that many people to grow food. Hell, we've got berry picking robots now and they only reason we don't use them is migrants are still cheaper. It's not necessarily a bad thing if we shift the wealth around and have few kids with better upbringings.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Because they're too smart to live in whatever urban shithole you reside in, drone. Now get back on the hamster wheel and shut the fuck up.
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.
the Internet of Things is a security disaster, the "mobile revolution" is a farce, cloud computing is outsourcing to people you shouldn't trust, "digital disruption" is niche and completely unpredictable, and the "perpetual increase of processing power" is a lie. starting a website is not always necessary and often a burden. social media is a hellscape of volatile idiots.
people don't need to "think digitally", what they need is to think for themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Let's keep this in perspective --
This was a presentation to a Rotary Club, which is generally a conservative, late middle-age to elderly crowd (think "moose lodge", etc). You'd have the same type of audience if you gave this presentation at the Rotary Club of Manhattan.
The "rural" angle in this is a complete red herring used to mock a group you are intolerant of.
So they don't have Internet. Why is that a problem? If they don't need it and don't want it, let's not force it on them.
So what if all the young people leave their little town? What's the big deal? A town is just a gathering of people...if it doesn't need to be there then the young people should leave it. The old people can finish out their years in a familiar world and their kids will visit once in a while. It's fine.
I don't think there is anything noble about these efforts. It is just a salesman using scare tactics to pitch a service that the town doesn't want or need.
Slashdot has posted several articles about people that have fled the internet of things due to the real or perceived health problems that living with technology causes. If we bring the technology everywhere then where can these people go to remove themselves from technology?
I only being halfway serious here. We should offer technology to everyone, but also offer the opportunity to do without.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
While I have no interest in going to Mississippi for a number of reasons. I question whether there might be value in having places that aren't as connected.
while i can imagine this is a real concern. Being untapped in doesn't necessarily have to be the be all end all. It's not necessarily as bad as we the tapped in make it seem.
Just another second banana
There's a name I haven't heard in, what, 20 years? Nice to see it again.
I tried to get my father interested in some tech stuff once. He had retired right around the time DBASE III was in general use, and he used that program to do some stuff for a government contractor. So, it's not like he wasn't capable. He just wasn't interested. He had his checks, his visits to the store, occasional trips to see people, good food, a good house, the remote control, etc. He literally told me he just didn't care about that kind of stuff at his age. If the rural population is mostly elderly that are set in their ways, and they've been planting corn and raising chickens twice as long as the presenter has been alive, in ain't broke. They ain't fixin' it.
I don't think this has much to do with the South. I bet it's an aging population they've got.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't 3ant 7o Parts of you are by clicking here area. It is the
Mississippi also forgot to keep up with the modern world and still chase off after the gays like they are witches or something, and that's just the tip of the iceberg
These people worship the magic hand and this is what it delivers. In other word they get what they asked for.
Great to read. Now explain the flag to us.
"Get on social media" But why?
Then why would they live in Mississippi?
Mississippi is a beautiful state!
Mississippi has spacious country living as well as big urbanized cities, if that's what you like.
Mississippi has warm kind people.
Mississippi has great food.
Mississippi has jobs from high tech and medical to manufacturing and agricultural.
Mississippi continues to be major economic production state for the U.S. Have you ever produced anything tangible?
You could substitute pretty much any state after the word "rural". Our rural infrastructure in this country is just that. I personally like having areas that are left alone. I think it should stay this way. Where else are all the politically inept paranoids going to live?
Lure them to MySpace. They won't know any better. ;)
The "more advanced" are probably still using AOL dial up.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Everything is cheaper here.
I hear this a lot, and while I'll take your word for it that it's true in practice, I'm not convinced it's true in principle. There are a lot of federal and state subsidies to rural areas -- both direct and indirect. E.g. the only reason there's any telecommunications services out there is the Universal Service Fund -- a transfer from urban/suburban to rural areas.
I've seen it argued that the subsidies go the other way: the federal government sends more money per capita in direct subsidies to urban and suburban areas than rural areas. That ignores state subsidies (for schools, roads, etc.), but more importantly, spending per capita is not the right measure. The measure should be the ratio of government subsidies to government tax receipts from an area -- because that covers the implicit subsidies as well. I haven't seen this broken down on a country by county basis, but if you look at a state by state basis, rural states get some serious subsidies. E.g. Mississippi (the state in TFA) gets $2.34 in federal spending for every $1 it pays in tax revenue. It's $1.81 in Indiana. In contrast, it's $0.48 for New Jersey, the most densely populated state, and $0.54 in your home state. (Source) I don't know if you benefit directly from this, but you definitely benefit from others who are subsidized.
In other words I think the cost of living in rural areas is artificially deflated, and if the federal tax code and subsidies get tweaked, there could be a "giant sucking sound" in rural parts of the country.
We have to connect Africa NOW!
Nice strawman, goober.
"It is the voice of stupidity."
I'm far more intelligent than you'll ever imagine yourself to be, retard.
Drop dead
I will certainly do so--long after I've written your obituary.
Where in the world did you get the bizarre idea that people who do not live their lives on the internet are [1] distrustful of science, [2] over-reliant on outdated mythologies, or [3] making their kids less competative??????
First, the internet has little to do with science and most people using it are idiots following the Kardashians every activity rather than contributing to the sequencing of the human genome or some such thing. For every tech-centric megabyte of data that crosses the web, there are probably a gig of porn, a gig of shopping for cheap junk from China, a couple gigs of netflix and so on.
Second, for every conservative Christian (the sort of person you probably intended to slander) who's not on the net, there are probably a dozen non-Christians checking horoscopes, and hundreds checking for the latest news on SETI (something for which there is less actual evidence than for the existence of Jesus). In fact, there are plenty of people who believe in "outdated mythologies" who are all over the web recruiting fighters and posting videos of beheadings - but you probably were too PC to mean THOSE religious people (we seem QUITE internet social media savvy...)
Third, the kids who are well-educated and do not waste their lives on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc but are actually out in the real world learning all sorts of useful stuff are more likely to be successful in life - VERY FEW people will strike it rich starting a social media company, all the other people involved in it are PRODUCTS, not even customers.
You might want to switch off the smart phone and take a vacation. Try a canoe on a lake. Do you know how to paddle one and how to swim should the need arise? Oh, let me guess, you think the canoe paddling sim is better and figure you'll google the subject should you ever encounter water deep enough that "swimming" might be an important skill...