John Phipps: Is Broadband the Secret to Reviving Rural America?
USFR- John's World 9/23/23
A few months ago, I read a thoughtful essay about how broadband could be a key to rural community revival.
Slowly our most rural citizens are gaining access to decent broadband speeds, and small towns are adding fiber-optic lines. However, the decline of the rural population and the viability of municipalities fewer than 10,000 people are not improving much.
The author’s point was higher quality broadband access would lure hassled urban and suburban dwellers working from home to the small towns. This influx of well-educated, middle-income citizens would revitalize our towns with their numbers, abilities, and wealth.
This conclusion is doubtful, for several reasons. Work from home is fading, for example. A primary misunderstanding is how bad urban life is compared to country living in the minds of those few of us who actually live in the country. Perhaps because many of us have never known anything but rural culture, we make up an image from a mashup of vacation experiences, unbalanced news stories and fiction.
Consider how few Hallmark Movie plots center on unhappy small-town heroines finding love, community, and true happiness in a large city. To be sure, fresh air and space are wonderful aspects of our way of life, but we casually overlook the problems with those supposed advantages. Call 9-1-1, try to order a pizza, or drive 60 miles to the doctor to be reminded of the life-quality tradeoffs for boundless elbow room.
Farmers especially often talk about city dwellers as almost another species. If this is true, why would those kinds of humans want to move to a community of our kind of humans and why would we want them to do so? What interests and opinions would we share with such newcomers?
The more we stress our own uniqueness and humble-brag about our higher moral values, the more exclusive we appear to outsiders. We do not absorb strangers smoothly or speedily, especially strangers with different values.
Small towns which win huge tech factory lotteries are realizing their declining communities will be economically renewed, but markedly changed. Most unnerving for some is what if urban invaders make us more like them than vice-versa?
