TechIntersect

I just finished a wonderful little book entitled Human Connection and the New Media edited by Barry N. Schwartz. Sounds like an appropriate title for the end of 2008, doesn’t it? The amazing thing is that the date of publication is 1973!

I have often thought it would be interesting to record the campaign promises of presidential candidates, then at the end of their term, go back and see how they measure up with what they actually did. (Perhaps there’s a web site which does this, but I’ve not found it yet.)

Although I haven’t found presidential promises to review, this book I discovered lets me review the promises of futurists from the past. The Human Connection is a compilation of several writer’s vision of the future as seen in the early 1970’s. Some of these people were amazingly accurate in their predictions. They discuss the video phenomenon we see today with technologies such as YouTube (although they only had videotape at the time) In a number of the articles, the Internet was clearly anticipated, although it was brand new and not widely available to the general public.

For example, the chapter Tomorrow we will communicate to our jobs was a reprint of a Peter C. Goldmark article originally published in The Futurist April 1972. He was a man after my own heart, because he calls for a New Rural Society to help offset the growing problem of urban expansion.

We would like to give all Americans an opportunity to work and live in small but attractive rural communities. The persons who chose to settle in these communities will become the new rural society.

The society that we envision does not now exist because, in general, people do not want to move into a rural area, no matter how attractive, unless it offers jobs, adequate educational and health services, opportunities for cultural pursuits, entertainment, social contacts, and so on.

Wow, he’s describing me. I live in Clyde, Kansas, population 700. People who visit us always comment on my town and how it’s residents take pride in its appearance. Yet our population continues to decline in the region. Our best and brightest head off for greener pastures. Yet each year a few expatriates return if they can find anything at all which offers a promise of earning a living.

I was one of these prodigal sons, going off to the Navy for six years, only to return at the end of my hitch. But the question of earning a living always nags at me. I’m currently commuting 70 miles one way to my K-State job. It’s a great job, but there is something special about living in the community where your father and grandfather grew up; I don’t think we’ll be moving closer anytime soon.

Not everyone is as committed to living here as I am, and many jobs aren’t as flexible as mine making the 2.5 hours of daily commuting even more daunting.

Goldmark proposed that improvements in communications technology could halt the migration from rural areas to cities. He suggested developing a network which would:

accommodate voice, data, and two-way video-phone. This would be the most basic urban “nerve system” which will be as vital as streets, water, or power… The network can be looked upon as provideing a pipe into every home, office or library through which one can not only converse, but also transmit and receive written materials, pictures, data, etc.

Hmm, this guy is good! It only took us thirty-five years, but what he is describing is finally happening. A year ago, Twin Valley Telecommunications began installing Fiber to the Home (FTTH) technology in Clyde, and all of the other communities which they serve. We jumped from a primarily dial-up Internet access town to a community with the very best broadband technology available in the country.

Now that we have the infrastructure in place, we now need to educate the citizenry about its potential uses. Knowledge workers of all kinds now have the ability to “communicate to our jobs“. My problem is that I view my profession, teaching, as primarily a hands-on profession. Sure there is always distance learning, and we have made great inroads into improving online learning over the past decade, but I did not become a teacher to spend all of my time behind a computer screen. Perhaps something of a compromise can be reached in which some of the time I take advantage of the telecommunications tools available to me, and some of the time I appear with my students in person.

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you this idea that sometimes old technologies can still be useful. In my case, the technology I am referring to is the book. People don’t seem to be reading as many of them these days and I worry we might be hurtling towards the vision of humanity as depicted in the movie Wall-E, where the people float around all day on chaise lounges equipped with personal video screens. Don’t do that to yourself! Get up! Walk around! Go to the library. Browse the stacks! Maybe you will find a very cool, old book as I did, which outdated, is still very relevant to today. You might even want to request Human Connection and the New Media through interlibrary loan if your library doesn’t have it.

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