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."
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.
Oh, bullshit. I have lived in many areas of the country, and found one important thing - people are the same everywhere.
And, shut the hell up with the racist crap.
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.
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
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.
"So are you sayiong that a Black American citizen can just show up in some all white village in rural Mississippi, and everyone will shower him or her with gifts? Invite them into their home for a nice dinner? Ignore them?"
Hate to burst your stereotypical statement, but I've seen multiple Black (& other ethnic) folks "just show up" here in MS. They didn't get showered with gifts, but were treated very politely (yep, invited to, and attend local churches)--much better than how I've seen the same color folks treated in other "more enlightened" places. Maybe you better get your news from someone w/o an ax to grind...
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.
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.
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"?
"The bad news is it's a horde of spambots trying to shove porn and pornware in your face at every turn."
"What's the good news?"
"That's also the good news."
Black people are treated nicer in Mississippi than they are in Detroit.
You're the worst kind of fool - one who believes his own bullshit.
The Internet is a series of tubes, and the tubes are filled with cats.
Yep, and there's absolutely no racism outside of MS, good to know that. Sorry to bust your bubble, but I've been all over this nation, and there are bigots everywhere. And those who shout "racism" the loudest I've found tend to be the most bigoted.
Non-operators (landowners who do not themselves farm) owned 29 percent of land in farms in 2007, though that proportion has declined since 1992.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/...
It's an interesting read. Industrial farming does take place but it's not as much as people seem to think nor is it on the rise. I don't usually watch TV but I do go down south a lot. Sometimes, when there, I turn on the TV in the hotel room and find the RFD channel and watch the Farm Report. I watch 'em sell cows and stuff too. No, I have no idea why I find it interesting. I can sit there and watch that shit for hours - oddly, I can't stand normal television for that long.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."