The Slow Zone

Biked for 1 hour

Note that this entry is going to sound insufferable and smug.

So, it's been almost a year and a half since I've been home to Alabama for Christmas, so it was a bit shocking to come home again from life in a tech hub on the west coast. Most people I know in Alabama do not have broadband. In fact, the number with computers may not be in the majority. Most of the people I know there have only recently gotten cell phones -- and none of them have smart phones, use SMS, e-mail on the phone, blackberries, etc. No one uses a voice over IP phone, has a bluetooth car, or drives a hybrid car. No one uses Netflix, and for a bare handful, this was the first Christmas they had used Amazon.

All of them knew about Google. :)

In all seriousness, it struck me that the gulf between life in somewhere like California and somewhere like small town Alabama was vast. There were a half dozen occasions where people simply didn't know some factual matter, and I whipped out my Nokia 9500 and retrieved an answer for them off the web. For some of them, this was knowledge they had looked for (sans computer) for months. For others, it was the first time they had even used the web [my grandfather told me he didn't think I could find a picture of one of the wooden boats his company had built over the decades -- I found one in under a minute!]. This sort of thing may seem like a parlor trick, but it's instructive to realize that most of these people worked at small businesses that didn't use e-mail, much less the web. There is a 'long-tail' (http://www.thelongtail.com/) of users here that could benefit greatly from this sort of use of technology.

The problem, though, is that the barrier to entry to this technology is not price. Not only would the computers pay for themselves, you can now buy a computer for the price of a television set (See Wal-mart's < $500 laptop for a stunning example). The problem is slightly one of education, since a large portion of these people grew up pre-internet. I think it ultimately runs a lot deeper than that, though, and a lot of it is tied up in the fact that the rural South's real 'divide' is a philosophical one.

To a great extent, our philosophy of the world constrains our course of action. There will always be people who break the walls of tunnel-vision, but in a culture that enforces a particular point of view with great vigor, these people are the exceptions. The comment I made to a friend was this:

"If people ran software, they'd be running People 95. No, People 3.1. Maybe People DOS?"

The point is that the philosophy you adhere to admits of a certain functioning in the world. If your philosophy does not allow for new things, or is inflexible, encountering something new or challenging tends to end poorly. I saw this with countless topics over the extended weekend in Alabama: Abortion, the war in Iraq, computers, the implications of changes in the real estate market, gay rights, or even a modern understanding of mental health ("This person is enabling her bad behavior." "What's enabling?"). The prevailing orthodoxies of the South have all these things in spades, but they have something more: A bluechip portfolio of beliefs designed to oppose change in the 'ways things are' or 'the way things oughta be'. That's because the belief structure is so fragile, it would fall apart when confronted with the world. Probably, this is because it's a belief system that made a sort of sense if you were an antebellum southerner stuck in a dirt poor village left with no opportunities for education or advancement.

People who are really into hyping technology often talk about 'technological singularities' -- points in time where the rise of a new technology changes the lives of the people employing it so much that their existence is fundamentally different than the people who came before.

Examples of this include:

* The printing press
* The automobile
* The telephone
* The PC
* The cell phone
* The internet

The thing that occured to me that my experience in Alabama felt like that sort of divide -- but instead of a technological singularity (though that was there too), there was a *philosophical* singularity at work. Unfortunately, the barrier to entry for switching philosophies is much higher and far more emotionally fraught than in upgrading our technologies.

How do you argue with someone when changing their opinion will bring a carefully constructed worldview crashing down? Seeing people that way is like seeing people trapped in the past -- and there's not much you can do to help.