Certain Silence

I was in Litchfield, Maine (population 3110), last week, staying with friends on the way to our annual trip to the Common Ground Country Fair, “a celebration of rural living.” We weren’t entirely sure the best way to get there, so by default we borrowed our friend’s computer to look at Google Maps.

This is a web service I’ve come to take for granted by now, not so much for directions but for basic, lay of the land stuff, but it was flat-out unusable over dialup, even at a relatively low-traffic time (7:30 AM on a Saturday morning). I wonder how many of the people who talk about the need for broadband have done this recently. The experience, after two plus years of living in cities and taking broadband access for granted, got me thinking again.

For my undergraduate thesis, I did a case study of an early FM radio network in upstate New York called the Rural Radio Network, as part of a larger examination on the impact of early radio regulation on rural peoples’ voices in contemporary mass media. My underlying thesis was that the decision to fund broadcasting through advertising revenue dictated an urban focus. More specifically, early FCC decisions to essentially force non-commercial stations off the air, including many pioneer stations at land grant colleges, cut a lot of innovative, agriculture and rural-focused programming off at the knees. The network I studied was an attempt, two decades later to remedy the absence of rural-focused programming through the new, and at the time neglected, medium of FM broadcasting.

I ended up caring about telecommunications regulation because I felt that the next decade ( and the previous) is an inflection point much like 1922-1934, a period where the rules will be set that govern the next 80-100 years of how people talk to one another. I thought it was important to make sure that rural people–my people–didn’t get shafted again.

The underlying principle is that a great deal of power is bound up in the answer to the question who is speaking, who is listening. The promise of the Internet is to give the power of speech to everyone, by disconnecting the ability to speak from concentration of capital, and yes, urbanity. So I’ll start from there.

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Tags: ruralbroadband dialup radio Internet regulation FRC FCC