Who Cares About Broadband?
Why should we care if there is widespread broadband Internet access in Tuolumne County? There are plenty of areas of our lives that do not need more technology and the complexity that goes along with it. We can get a couple of hundred channels of digital TV from Comcast, what more do we want?
Allow me to offer a hand-wavy, big picture sort of answer: There's something really interesting going on around the ways we are communicating with each other using the Internet. (And make no mistake, we have barely begun the process of learning to do this.) The rest of the world is forging ahead with making these connections. Compared with most of Europe and large parts of Asia, what we consider high speed Internet access is laughably slow. I was thrilled when a couple of weeks ago, Frontier Communications boosted my DSL speed to 3 mb/sec. Who would have thought that dinky little Frontier would be providing the highest speeds in the county? However, there are places in the world where regular folks like you and me are getting 10 times that speed for the same cost. I believe there will come a time in the not too distant future when most of the people in the world will have access to most of information in the world and to each other. We need to insist on being part of those conversations.
Closer to home, there are newly emerging ways of conducting business that go beyond the convenience of free shipping from Amazon.com. Companies are discovering the value of extending information about their products and services beyond their physical premises. Customers are finding each other and sharing their stories about the businesses that they deal with, bypassing the marketing departments. Collective knowledge is being created every time one of us writes a review on Amazon, posts a video on YouTube or submits their profile on MySpace (I didn't say it was useful knowledge). One of the most encouraging things I heard recently about broadband adoption is that there is a direct relationship between increased time spent online and decreased time spent watching TV. While a lot of that online time may be spent wandering aimlessly around the web, I suspect that a fair amount of it is spent interacting; blogging, IMing, emailing and looking at things we're actually interested in.
So, those are my big picture thoughts on why we should care about broadband. But I don't plan on beating this particular drum very often in this blog. I come in contact with a lot of technology and spend much of my day online. When I find something that I think is useful or fun, I'd like to pass it along. Most of these things are online so...you'll want to have a broadband connection to check them out. If you have any thoughts, please add them in comments and if you want to start your own discussion, hop over to the Network Sierra Forum.
