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Return to the founding agrarian spirit of America
2/8/2004 4:14 PM
Thomas Jefferson was quite concerned with creating institutions that
would promote and protect what he understood to be the fundamentally agrarian
spirit of America. This meant to him
that the government must create a space for people to be free and be safe,
without directly interfering in local affairs. States, he
believed, were better equipped to deal with the unique problems of their
communities because state governments were much closer to the people than the
federal government was, and Jefferson wanted to preserve local community
identities. The federal government was to unify all states but not
replace a local identity with a national one.
Government was to provide stability and security for states,
communities, and people.
Many basic American values stem from this line of thought, particularly concerning work ethic and the value of self-sufficiency. Jefferson was concerned with the industrialization beginning in the North at the time, and felt that a much better way to exist was a way that is in touch with the land. Technology, he felt, could be impersonal, depriving individuals of the kind of existence Jefferson thought all people should have. Technology can be scary. But technology can also be human centric, enabling stronger communities and enhancing individual quality of life as people gain more intellectual control of their situations. We think of things as 'ours' when we know how they work, and how they help us.
We fear that the national government and large corporations are
currently planning to impose a unified telecommunications technology on all
rural communities throughout the United States. The individuals driving this planning are simply not cognizant to
the social science that strongly suggests that this type of imposition of
centralized corporation controlled technology will fail because the interests
of local governance has not been consulted.
We fear that the Republic will fail by failing to stand for local and
state government.
Today we are at a unique crossroads. Technology can give rural
communities the world at their fingertips, and open up vast new realms of
knowledge. Technology will help create new types of communities and
strengthen existing ones. If the use of
this technology is oriented to a local community constituency then we all gain
in wealth and freedom. When the power to understand what, exactly,
technology can do for a specific community and how, exactly, communication
technology WORKS is given to a community, this technology will become PART of
the community. This empowerment of the individual assumes proper
educational experiences AND full participatory democracy at the local governance. The current communication technology becomes
a technology for knowledge sharing as existing information production systems
are used for community-based purposes.
Some rural communities are planning an educational, citizen-centric,
locally operated wireless community infrastructure. This infrastructure is grounded on a line of sight wireless
technology. Transactional transparency
provides a healthy, safe and resilient environment supporting education, health
care and emergency response programs.
Though modeled after the World Wide Web, this community infrastructure
has semantic technology providing clear skies by encoding all transactional
histories and providing educational services based on distance learning and
knowledge base technology such as electronic archives.
The wireless infrastructure will improve the quality of life while
serving as a template for local emergency response programs. These emergency response programs increase
national security through sustainable resilience in heartland of America.
The core idea is that a rural community is healthier and safer if
1)
Citizens
are able to interact with the rest of the world through technology that is
understood and under local control.
2)
Citizens
integrate these systems into a rural community that the citizens perceive as
improving their quality of life.
Rural communities are worried about large corporations coming in and
providing the technology without their taking account of local value
systems. Rural communities see outside forces that could destroy their
value systems. On the other hand, human-centric information production,
as proposed in our community infrastructure project, is designed to alleviate
those concerns. Safety, comfort and economic
sustainability are provided through this technology and the safer living
environments that the technology enables.
A process development methodology is being used. Within this process development model we
find a structured means to bring from the existing community a common purpose
that expands economic growth without increasing overall population. We asked in
what ways might new technology compliment current values and improve quality of
life.