I had been thinking about social networking as something for teenagers or techno-hip oldsters like me. But yesterday I read this piece in Minnpost. Almost without thinking about it, I emailed the farmersonly.com link to my cousin to give to her brother, who is a bachelor dairy farmer in Wisconsin. In Amish country.
My cousin lives down the road from her brother on a hobby farm that they bought from an Amish family. Although the house now has electricity and heat, her only connectivity option is very slow dial-up. My brother and I stayed up half the night Christmas Eve trying to download 2 things: updated antivirus definitions and the MSN IM client so her kids can IM their friends. We were not successful. The kids feel they are out of the loop at school because they cannot participate in the on-line social world — and they are 10 and 12. All their friends are on MSN, but if you’re a minor you need the full client with the parental controls. So even though they come from a nice home and have a fairly new computer, my godchildren are on the wrong side of the digital divide, or at least partway down the slope. Text, you say –but cell phone coverage at their house is virtually non-existent as well.
Social networking can bridge great distances, but only where the infrastructure is in place. In Homegrown Democrat, Garrison Keillor talks about the importance of the shared public school experience in shaping community and the identity of an Midwestern American citizen. Are children & teens who are left out of social networks for one reason or another doomed to be out-of-step with their generation forever?
February 27, 2008 at 2:33 pm
You end with a rather weighty question. The answer, I suppose, depends on the degree to which form follows function, to which the “thing itself” is mediated through context. Proponents of the internet from its early conception have considered the computer an extension of the mind; in this sense, those of a generation who use computer technology through social networking may end up having differing notions of social interaction and friendship than those without. However, one wonders what the influence of physicality will remain to be upon our psyche–i.e., will our conception of social relationships be essentially shaped by the “form” of relationship taken from the tradition of physical proximity? Or will the function of technology be to transpose and transform these notions. Part of the difficulty here is in ever distilling a formal conception of freindship, relationship, society, and physicality at all.
I’ve been waiting for the digital divide issue to really enter the discussion here. I’ve noticed several posts recently from various classmembers in which the concept is given play. I wonder what you think about the potential impact of such things as wireless access provided by the city/state/nation (is this a reasonable function of government, for example). I also wonder how the suggestion that library 2.0 is about more than technology strikes you. Can the 2.0 mentality encompass the Amish/rural/computerless?
February 27, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I think access for rural areas may need be incentivized by government, much as rural electrification was. Where population density is low, the economics of installing the infrastructure will not play out. Satellite and wireless also have infrastucture costs.
2.0 is about more than technology. It is about new economic models, educational models, social customs. But the manifestation of much of it is through technology. Our government thought that bringing electricity to all citizens was an important factor in making the US a modern nation. I believe that internet connectivity is as important in this century as electricity was in the 20th. Is there the political will to make it the WPA project for the coming recession? I don’t know. The concept of the public good has been so maligned that it may be a hard sell.