Looking to the future

The internet in its claim to be “the great equalizer” offers near instant access to information for all. But those of us in rural, unwired areas, left to sluggish, faulty dial-up, are feeling the widening technological gap.

In recent months, my husband and I have been considering the options available to get high-speed internet service. For one, it would make this column a bit easier to get out. For John, it would mean he could do even more schoolwork at home.

We investigated getting a satellite dish, but then settled on a local DSL provider—and while the local telephone company has agreed to extend its high-speed line up Route 97 near our home, the project has been held up with Verizon and NYSEG. It is currently on hold until NYSEG can replace some old poles—a necessity before the cable can be strung.

For us, this may be a small problem to fix, but it represents the struggle that rural communities are having in becoming technologically up to date at least in a very basic way (and at least for the moment).

In our area, new business endeavors and housing sales are increasingly being held up by our lack of high-speed internet. I know of more than one house sale broken because high-speed was not locally available.

While the Obama administration has pledged an expansion of broadband access to underserved communities reminiscent of the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act, funding for the project will be hard to come by.

Last month, the administration did dedicate $7.2 billion in Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to broadband grant and loan programs in 17 states for construction and development of internet services. It is federal aid that is essential for the recovery and growth of our rural communities. In addition, the FCC is proposing a possible (and controversial) broadband tax to support this important initiative.

Meanwhile, I am personally divided. After all, I don’t have a cell phone; I don’t have cable TV. In fact, we didn’t have a TV for many years. The old set we now have has a 12-inch screen. Do my kids really need high-speed video games?

There are a lot of things I still hold onto from the past. I forget and call our driveway the “barnyard” and I wait for the mail to come as a highlight of the day.

I still spend considerable time sifting through newspaper clippings and shifting piles of old letters and magazines around my house. They aren’t being saved so much for nostalgic reasons as for their future usefulness. I might need them someday. They could be useful for “future fiction,” I sometimes say. If not for (the fictional) “future fiction,” why save the baby name book or my father’s 1952 “Handbook for Cattlemen?” There is useful information in there. Or maybe it’s just rural thriftiness.

But then again, why am I saving the apocalyptic article from The Hancock Herald detailing the time it would take for the town of Hancock to become submerged should the Cannonsville Reservoir ever break? A likely story?

It’s like having my own mini (if idiosyncratic) encyclopedia. My own “Majestic, pulp-begotten ancestral stockpile,” as Nicholson Baker says in his book “Double Fold.” Subtitled “Libraries and the Assault on Paper,” this book exposes the destruction of historic archives of newspapers and books by the people who are meant to save them for the rest of us.

Now comes the time to tie all the loose ends of this column together. Time to reconcile its contradictions and sudden changes of subject. To tie it up with a bow—or to recognize that this can’t always be done and get on with it.

There’s just me sitting here—at the computer screen, with the January snow falling outside the window—waiting with a stake in the future. Looking for the future to arrive.