Social and Economic Technology - 6.2. Economic Impacts from a Sociological point of View.

Technology is needed in the countryside if it is to economically survive.

Many jobs being offered now rely upon technology. Call centres, sales, clerks, artistry, education etc. to name but a few. Many more could do through the correct use of technology. The problem is, even these industries are perceived as having an inherent need for "centralization", putting them into the larger towns. This makes them totally out of reach to people in rural areas. Yet the situation has arisen purely because of a precedent set before present technology had evolved. Not much work outside the traditional countryside work, i.e. farming etc., is actually available in the countryside without the potential worker making a huge investment in both time and transport costs. For most alternative work available this investment is unlikely to ever pay off. This makes the alternative work inaccessible. The cost of personal transport in Wales is phenomenal. There is no decent public transport infrastructure to speak of at all. There are very few railways. The narrow roads can hardly support the existing traffic demand. If commuting became common place, accident rates, and associate expense, would sore. The car laws themselves are aimed at "Motorway Mad" executives, putting car ownership almost out of legal reach to many trying to join the jobs ladder.

The public road services in rural areas do not, and in actual fact cannot offer a solution. There is a huge problem with rural buses. As long as there is a feeling of "If you miss it, you've had it, because it is the only one" people will never rely on it. Either a bus has to be provided at least once every half hour from early morning to late nigh, or it will never attract enough use to be of any significance. Clearly this problem has no easy solution, expense aside. Even if vast sums of money were put into making rural transport "work", there would be very undesirable side effects on the rural culture and state of the roads, bringing all "city problems" right into the countryside. The correct solution from every point of view is to develop the IT infrastructure instead.

Yet the IT infrastructure is so let down by the available software, it is about as effective at tackling the route of the problem as one extra rural bus.

It is unsatisfactory that there is uncertainty whether any particular new piece of software will run properly on "your" computer. It is also unsatisfactory that every new piece of software, even if it does nothing that was not done in the 1980's always needs the latest and greatest hardware to run. What is even more unsatisfactory is when it unpredictably fails when it was thought it was satisfactorily running.

This problem can be solved if a the technology is adapted to the problem, rather than the technology targeting the users who may be less irritated by this type of failure.

It is clearly beyond even modern software technology to expect computers to do this for themselves. The very machine that is supposed to be so good at organizing everything else singularly fails to organize itself properly! What must be done is to recognize that the typical user is not the idiot that he/she is made out to be, and present the problem in a way that he/she can solve it. It means accepting that the "automatic car" in the IT world is so far a failure, and that drivers need to be trained to operate a manual version. In actual fact, the amount of training required should be noticeably less than learning to drive a manual car. However, as with the car example, how things are named and done must be standardized, and all problems likely to be met should have been covered in the training. The few who will never "master" technology in this way and who genuinely have no access to a friend or relative to help out, should be assisted as a community service.

The real problem lies, not in designing the software, but in designing the system of human and database support for it. Of course no new piece of software can be guaranteed not to foul up and cause an adverse effect on a whole system. That is just like saying that if you buy a new car, you cannot guarantee that a wheel won't fall off as it is being driven away from the showroom. The important issue is the frequency that it happens, and the expectation of action if it does. If wheels frequently fell off a new model of car, it would be unimaginable that people would simply hook them back on again and carry on. There would be strong exchanges with suppliers, and an expectation that something would be done about it. There is no reason why the computer "IT car" should be any different. It is only a matter of trained public expectation.

Microsoft supports principally large business, where expensively trained IT are on hand to implement and control the use of the technology. This approach is impractical and too costly for the rural situation. Microsoft also offer products aimed at the "domestic desktop user", but these products are too unstable and unreliable for any sort of business use, even rural business. Microsoft have a policy that no modifications or developments may be made to the products, and it is impractical to use Microsoft products for situations described in his document. Linux is an alternative technically mature and stable operating system, but it does not begin to address the issues of support and understandability by the average user. However, Linux is an implementation of the Free Software Foundation that believes all software should be open source and adaptable. What rural Wales needs is the funding to adapt Linux to be the system suitable for rural Wales. This would have to be followed by funding for a database of what combinations of hardware and software will work, and widespread training in the rural community to implement the system. To implement this scenario must not be underestimated, BUT it is not major when judged against the funds available to help the Welsh Rural Economy.

If the changes to Linux were implemented out of funding obtained for the purpose, there is no reason why the actual software should not be free, and the support for it only being a relatively small re-orientation of the existing systems of adult and school IT education. There is even a licence system that ensures the result has every chance of being left that way. It should be a publicly owned product, within the principles of the Free Software Foundation.

Distance Learning in schools

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