Certain Silence

All this reading on the history of electricity and rural electrification, and what do I have to show for it? Is the REA a model to emulate for broadband in rural areas?

This is not my whole answer, but there’s an important distinction between rural infrastructure issues in the 1930s and 1940s and rural infrastructure issues today. Rural is no longer synonymous with farming and agriculture, economically/demographically speaking. This is a longer story, and it raises some interesting definitional questions (what is rural anyway?).

In reading histories of the REA I’m struck again and again on the REA’s reliance on the Grange, the American Farm Bureau Federation and other farmer-centered organization (e.g. extension services), an infrastructure of education and social capital that made it feasible to base rural electrification on cooperatives. Who would fill this role today?

technorati tags:rea, electrification, broadband