State’s Countryside Wired for the Future

When we left San Francisco on our Techno Travels project five weeks ago, part of our goal was to assess how technology was affecting rural California, and we had certain expectations about what we’d find.

In the Bay Area, of course, technology--and technophiles--are everywhere, but we assumed that in rural areas it would be less of a presence, and perhaps less welcome.

We were wrong on both counts.

Admittedly, our methods were less than scientific. We tried to talk to everybody we met about technology, asking each person the same short list of questions: What, if any, technologies do you use? Do you use the Internet? How do you think your area has been served by modern technology?

We found, first of all, that use of the Internet is widespread. While many people felt the telephone companies in particular had not served rural areas as well as they might, there was also a sense that great strides had been made in the last few years.

“Since we’ve gotten a local Internet service provider, the number of people using computers is doubling by the day,” said Boyd Mello, manager of Burson’s Computers in Mount Shasta, Calif. Mello also pointed out that, with the arrival of the local ISP, the profile of the store’s clientele has changed.

“Our customers used to buy products for business purposes,” he said. “Now a lot of our extra clients want computers for personal use.”

While a few people, like Janet Kelley of Quincy, deemed the Internet “a vehicle for pornography that endangers our children,” they tended to be, like Kelley, people who had never actually used it.

Even Kelley was quick to add that, if she could afford a computer, “I would get involved with [the Internet]. I don’t know, there could be a way to do good [with it].”

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People we interviewed said they used the Net for all the usual reasons: for business, to find information, to make or maintain contact with others, and to advertise businesses and publicize causes.

“Showcasing the area’s beauty on the Internet has helped our local preservation efforts,” says Steve Gerace, editor of the Mount Shasta Herald. “The visitors who make their way to Mount Shasta because they learned about us on the Web seem to have a better understanding of what conservation and preservation efforts involve.”

In retrospect, we see that our surprise at the popularity of the Internet was linked to our own attitudes about technology. And those have changed in important ways as a result of another part of the Techno Travels--exploring how technology could play a role in home schooling our children.

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When we first logged on a few years ago--because we had to for business purposes--we did so kicking and screaming all the way. Our reluctance had to do primarily with our concern that computers and the Internet could pose a potential threat to our children’s healthy development.

We make it a practice to be wary of new technologies before embracing them, or even shaking their hands. We’d heard lots of stories about kids who planted themselves for hours in front of the computer screen, surfing the Internet, viewing CD-ROMs and playing video games, and we always thought such scenarios sounded, at best, unbalanced.

This trip has softened our stand. Our children clearly have both feet planted in the Computer Age and experience none of our queasiness on this matter. When we were confused about how something worked on one of the laptops during the trip, we consulted our oldest son, 9-year-old Aliseo. He always figured out what needed to be done.

It became crystal clear to us that our children have a certain fluency around hardware, software and the Internet, even without spending a lot of time with technology at home.

We still wouldn’t allow unfettered access to the computers in our house, and we’ll continue to accompany the children on the Internet and help them develop the good judgment and critical thinking they need to make good use of it.

But it’s now easier for us to see it as a force for good, largely because we encountered its human face during our travels.

Oh, and one other important truth we learned about technology during our travels: “It takes a lot of time to figure out how the computers work, how to fix them, how the phones work, how to fix them, how to drive the RV, how to fix it, how to ride the bicycles, how to fix them,” observed our 8-year-old son, Eli. “But it’s worth it.”