Social and Economic Technology - 8.1. What needs to be done.
The Solution to the Rural Economy and Village Culture.
It lies in the correct implementation of Information Technology, not in propping up the failed values from the industrial revolution that created the rural crisis in the first place. Information Technology has been overtaken by those very values, and it is not widely acknowledged that things could easily be different. Rural areas should not be encouraged to created suburban conglomerates in order to survive or thrive. Forcing a commute from the countryside several miles to a town solves neither the transport nor the relevant social problems. Investment that indirectly encourages motorized commuting is not solving the rural problem. Instead those in a rural economy need to be sponsored and organized to help themselves, acknowledging that they inherently live scattered from each other, or in a village based lifestyle. They need an affordable integrated Information Technology Infrastructure that includes software, education, and support in a form suitable for them to use where they are. This could revolutionize life and reverse the tradition that work in the countryside implies economic leprosy.
It is already acknowledged that the rural economy is essential to the economy of the country as a whole, and money is already spent attempting to revive it. However, pushing the latest technology into an environment for which it is plainly not suitable is often not an appropriate solution. Broadband in its present form is a classic example of a technology that just cannot help the true rural countryside. A system needs to be created that truly replaces the expectations that people must be able to physically travel to work and obtain services. To implement the required concepts is far from being over ambitious.
Surely money is already being spent on Information Technology in Rural Areas?
Money often seems to be poured into technology concepts without proper consideration of real need or consequences. Take, for example, the laying on of free Information Technology courses to rural people, supposedly to introduce them to the technology. Yet what is taught is how to use business software, e.g. Microsoft Excel. The only way they will ever make practical use of this type of skill is to leave the rural economy, fueling the grip that foreign companies have on our whole economy. The courses in general offer little help as to software administration or what to do in the event of software or hardware failure. That may be considered 'too advanced' but it epitomizes the problem that the software being taught is just not suitable for a rural environment. IT courses in general assume that computers are relatively expensive items that are designed for planned redundancy. Once again not an incentive to get the technology into the countryside, and not necessarily true. Schools may, to varying degrees, use Information Technology between themselves, but when it comes to interaction with home and parents, licensing rules make the technology being taught 'closed' to the children when not inside the school and closed completely to their parents. This makes 'homework' in general Information Technology excluded, once again inhibiting any incentive to introduce serious practical use of Information Technology into rural homes, or village centres.