Social and Economic Technology - 7.3. Technical Aspects
Present Technology Fails the Rural Countryside.
Several years ago, Information Technology promised to revolutionize the way we live, and to bring in new norms and values to supersede those left over from the Industrial revolution that aimlessly developed into the car based economy. Promises were made that we would soon be working from wherever we wanted to be, and that we would become much less dependant upon physical transport for both work and leisure. This was to mean we that we would no longer have to travel for most leisure activities. Work would no longer dictate where we lived, and our home location and cultural environment would become our individual choice. The 'currency of economic activity' was to broadly shift from being materials and manufacturing based to being services and information based. Yet that freedom to choose where we worked was not going to force us to work at home if we elected not to commute to premises owned by our employers. The concept of the telecottage was born, where people could commute locally out of their homes into a village centre type of work environment. The choice of where to live did not only mean complete freedom as to where in a country we lived, we could choose the cultural atmosphere as well.
The economic scenario promised by Information Technology has not materialized, and is in great danger of not materializing in time to reverse the destruction of the rural economy. It is true that Information Technology has evolved, and it is probably as important to jobs and economic performance as ever was predicted, but the pressure and working conditions are as centralizing and as bad for the rural economy as ever they were pre-Information Technology.
The reason for this is the way the technology has been introduced, and the aims of those providing it. Had Henry Ford been obliged to provide the roads for his 'model T' to run on, he would no doubt have put effort into ensuring they worked best with his patented wheel style to deliberately fend off competition onto those roads. Then as time progressed, he will have noticed that lorries were much better money spinners than cars, and developed the roads around the needs of them. The humble car owner would have been at such a disadvantage that maybe the car economy would never have really taken off from that scenario. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAS HAPPENED SO FAR IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. The only established software technology available to the 'man in the street' is Microsoft. Microsoft, and other large computing companies are really only interested in providing a service for centralized big business, for that is where their revenue has come from. Big business has been given no incentive to consider operating in the rural countryside. This scenario continues the norms established by the industrial revolution and the car economy. The freedoms promised by the Information Technology revolution have never followed on from the technology. This is not merely an inconvenience, it means a rural economy cannot exist in this day and age. Propping the economy up with tax payer's money in the way it is so often currently being done is equivalent to attempting to solve a starving nation's problems with emergency food aid. The intelligent thing to do, is to long term solve the problem by sending seeds, know-how, and the wherewithal that the people may pick themselves up and become self sufficient. This latter approach is not so apparent when it comes to Information Technology. The know-how is not obviously to hand, and it would not be in the interest of Microsoft & co. to have it created assuming they cared or understood about rural problems in the first place, which they do not. However, the seeds and the wherewithal are already around, and the know-how would be best created by those in the rural economy itself.