International Communication Gazette

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DOI: 10.1177/001654929104800203 1991; 48; 105 International Communication Gazette

Andrew Calabrese in rural America

The periphery in the center: the information age and the 'good life'

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105

The periphery in the center: The information age and the’good life’ in rural America *

ANDREW CALABRESE

Department of Communication, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, U.S.A.

Abstract. This paper presents a historical perspective on contemporary development effortsin rural America’s communication infrastructure. It is well known throughout the world thaturban poverty and decay are lingering problems in America, sometimes leading to com-parisons with the Third World. However, it is not as widely known that another "periphery"exists here, namely, the rural poor. This paper examines public discussions and decisionsabout how to deliver rural America from economic decline through the advances of theinformation age. Highlighted below are the conflicting interests between the long-term ruralresidents and the affluent new class which stands to gain as "information highways" enablethe latter to live and work in remote areas and enjoy a high-tech "pastoral ideal". While

preserving their cosmopolitan connections, affluent newcomers are likely to control the

politics and economics of the rural areas into which they move. In contrast to this possibility,the stated and worthy goals of the recent rural development efforts are to empower ruralcommunities, but it is difficult to tell which communities are being empowered. It is arguedthat in order to gain a true commitment from enterprises deciding to locate operations inrural areas, these companies should match public funds with private funds to construct

community owned and controlled telecommunications infrastructures.

I warn my countrymen that the great recent progress madein city life is not a full measure of our civilization; for ourcivilization rests at bottom on the wholesomeness, the

attractiveness, and the completeness, as well as the

prosperity, of life in the country.

President Theodore Roosevelt, letter of transmittal for the

Report of the Country Life Commission, 19091

* Earlier versions of this manuscript were presented at the 1990 meeting of the IntemationalAssociation for Mass Communication Research in Lake Bled, Yugoslavia and the 1991

meeting of the Rural Sociological Society in Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. I am grateful to

Donald Jung for research assistance, and to Sandra Braman, Vincent Mosco, Lars Qvortrup,Miroljub Radojkovic, and Peter Shields for helpful comments on earlier drafts.




106

The vast majority of average Americans, urban and

suburban, have either lost sight of rural America or havesubconsciously bought-off on the advertisers’ view of ruralAmerica. This view of rural America, as portrayed on thescreen and in the magazine, is one of the clean water, freshair, good tasting and highly nutritional foods and a care-free life style... However, to the possible surprise of manyurban and suburban Americans, there is another Rural

America... let’s call it "Really Rural America". ReallyRural America, my America, is home to millions of

forgotten poor persons (blacks, whites, Hispanic, NativeAmericans, men, women, young and old) and is a stark

contrast to the "good life" which is generally thought toexist.

Larry N. Farmer, President,Mississippi Action for Community Education, 19892

Introduction ~

.

&dquo; ~. .

Rural America has undergone significant transformations since 1909,

although many of the same themes are present: the impulse to foster

community cohesion and pride, the desire to eliminate poverty, the commit-ment to extend urban conveniences, and the recognition of increasinginterdependence between rural and urban America. However, today’smessage has added complexity due to the steadily increasing dependence ofrural America on the fortunes of the world economy. As this study of ruralcommunication policy illustrates, there has been a long history of politicaleffort to develop the productive capacity of rural America through innova-tion in communications, dating back much further than the relatively recentera of electronic communication. Today, we can find many enthusiasticpolicy makers, promoting their versions of &dquo;wired cities&dquo;, &dquo;information

highways&dquo;, and &dquo;electronic cottages&dquo;, representing what one writer refers toas &dquo;the assimilation of science fiction to organizational society and to

organizational needs&dquo; (Martin, 1980: 22). People can work from their

homes and from remote office locations and live ever farther from urban

centers due to the &dquo;location-independent&dquo; nature of their work. Thus, theycan have greater autonomy as they pursue their careers and personalinterests under spatially decentralized and temporally flexible cir-

cumstances. Whether such visions are generalizable to the entire rural




107

population or whether they apply only to elite segments seeking newtechnological infrastructures to enhance their chances of finding &dquo;the goodlife&dquo; in the country is a matter of concern in this paper.

The culture and politics of &dquo;rural community&dquo;

Although much of the urgency with which rural American development isadvocated by policy makers is premised on the apparent conviction thatsomething must be done to halt and reverse economic decline, an equally ifnot more powerful impulse is rooted in a nostalgic and technologically-grounded &dquo;pastoral ideal&dquo;, described by Leo Marx (1964: 6): &dquo;The soft veil

of nostalgia that hangs over our urbanized landscape is largely a vestige ofthe once dominant image of an undefiled, green republic, a quiet land offorests, villages, and farms dedicated to the pursuit of happiness&dquo; (see alsoSegal, 1985). Images of the harmony of nature and civilization in ruralsettings are prominent in American utopian thought, and they persist todayin the writings of futurists who envision an ideal marriage of communica-tion technology and country life (e.g., Toffler, 1980). According to theseseductive visions, if more of us move to remote areas and do our work andsustain our memberships in various spatial and &dquo;virtual&dquo; communities

through telecommunications, we will have less crowded cities, less crime,less traffic congestion, a cleaner environment, a closer bond with nature,and a more organic blending of our professional and personal lives.

In Lewis Mumford’s first book, The Story of Utopias (1922), he ex-pressed his concern about what he witnessed as the emerging role of

technology in country life by noting the tendency in his time for the &dquo;goodlife&dquo; in the countryside to be a commodified reality resting on a foundationof class privilege:

The conditions which underly this limited and partial good life are political power andeconomic wealth; and in order for the life to flourish, both of these must be obtained inalmost limitless quantities. The chief principles that characterize this society are

possession and passive enjoyment. (Mumford, 1922: 201)

Mumford saw the automobile, the phonograph and the early radio as meansof isolating (insulating) the affluent, thus leading to &dquo;a divorce from the

underlying community&dquo; and deepening &dquo;the elements of acquisitiveness andpassive, uncreative, mechanical enjoyment&dquo; (pp. 210-211). In his harsh andprescient critique, Mumford saw little authenticity or equality in the country




108

&dquo;good life&dquo; he examined. Similar in perspective to Mumford is RaymondWilliams, whose critique in The Country and the City ( 1974) of the bour-geois idealization of country life and rural community in English literatureis summed up in his statement about Jane Austen’s work: &dquo;What she seesacross the land is a network of propertied houses and families, and throughthe holes of this tightly drawn mesh most actual people are simply not seen&dquo;(p. 166; see also Newby, 1979). In this observation, Williams indicates howthe detached and idealized notion of the rural community elides the underly-ing class inequity upon which it is premised. Elsewhere Williams (1983)discusses the hollowness of the very term &dquo;community&dquo; in its contemporaryuses:

Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relation-ships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. Whatis most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state,nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavorably, and never to be given anypositive opposing or distinguishing term. (Williams, 1983: 76)

These observations are well-illustrated in rural development policy, wherethe term &dquo;community&dquo; is applied loosely and freely. Today, the significantsocial relations on which rural life is premised are brought into relief whenwe examine the all-purpose concept of &dquo;community&dquo; and its meanings in anage of increasingly disembodied social space. &dquo;Community&dquo; is a

problematic term, yet it is also a sacred one with seemingly universalappeal. No doubt this paradox is the reason Raymond Williams (1979) wasled to write: &dquo;It was when I suddenly realized that no one ever used

&dquo;community&dquo; in a hostile sense that I saw how dangerous it was&dquo; (p. 119).This has not always been the case.

Philosophical and theoretical discourse on the idea of community hasbeen a theme of western thought at least since Plato. In Ferdinand Tonnies’(1887/1957) treatise on the subject, he distinguishes between &dquo;community&dquo;(gemeinschaft) and &dquo;society&dquo; (gesellschaft) by using the parallel concepts ofnatural law and rational law: For Tonnies, the concept of gemeinschaftstresses familial concord, religion, and collective will (natural law) in

contrast with the gesellschaft emphasis on the formal contract, publicopinion, and state legislation (rational law). In this typology, given theperiod in history in which it was developed, a certain degree of parallel witha rural-urban typology made sense. Indeed, Tonnies himself saw city life asbeing associated primarily with gesellschaft, not gemeinschaft (p. 231).Nevertheless, Tonnies’s distinction is not premised mainly on the principle




109

of spatial division between country and city, but rather on the nature ofsocial relations. As it happens, when Tonnies wrote his analysis, the

prevailing social character of rural settings was that of gemeinschaft. Whilethis condition of country life may still prevail in many parts of the worldtoday, it is not the case in the late capitalist societies of the United Statesand Western Europe.

Unfortunately, many sociologists have over-extended the parallelbetween a &dquo;rural-urban continuum&dquo; and that of gemeinschaft-gesellschaft.In a seminal work, R.E. Pahl (1968) dismisses the rural-urban continuum as&dquo;vulgar Tonniesism&dquo; to make the point that gemeinschaft and gesellschaftrelationships can be found among different groups in the same place,whether it be a rural or an urban locale (p. 278). This point has also beenmade by Herbert Gans (1982) in his important study of community bondsamong Italian-Americans in an urban setting. As Bell and Newby (1971)note, there is ample reason to &dquo;doubt the sociological relevance of thephysical differences between ’rural’ and ’urban’ in highly complex in-

dustrial societies&dquo;. They also observe that today &dquo;[t]he local and the

national confront each other in towns and villages, and the same conceptsand analytical tools can be used to analyse the consequent social processesin either&dquo; (pp. 51-52). Today, the rural-urban distinction requires recogni-tion that gesellschaft increasingly dominates rural life, and that

gemeinschaft can be a part of urban life.3 This is especially important asprimary social relations are maintained over increasingly long distances (forexample, &dquo;commuter marriages&dquo; are increasingly common) and whileemployer-employee relations in a growing number of occupations do notdepend on spatial co-location. Of course, a telecommunications infrastruc-ture figures centrally in these developments.What the assumptions about &dquo;developing&dquo; rural communities neglect is

evidence suggesting that significant portions of &dquo;native&dquo; rural populations(long-term inhabitants) are threatened by the trend of urban-to-rural

migration for a variety of reasons. For example, as Ploch (1980) notes in astudy of urban-to-rural migration in Maine, &dquo;the majority of local peopleare not ready to permit relative strangers to take over their town govern-ment, schools, or other institutions.&dquo; Ploch also notes that the quick move-ment of affluent newcomers into leadership positions strains pre-existingsocial relations. The rapid ascent of newcomers is attributed to their

&dquo;superior education, past leadership and managerial experience, ability toassess local situations without the encumbrance of past history, and orienta-tions that are often creative and innovative&dquo; (Ploch, 1980: 299-301).




110

Commenting on poverty and class division in rural America, CynthiaDuncan (1991) notes how even under conditions where public sector fundsare put to the purpose of enhancing economic opportunities, the rural poorgenerally lack the resources to bring about an equitable distribution of thesefunds. Thus, the corrupt or simply privileged handling of governmentresources helps to sustain a rigid, two-tiered society in rural America (seealso ’Rural Sweatshops’, 1989). The condition is exacerbated with thearrival of the new class of technical and professional intelligentsia whoenjoy the benefits of country life and their own &dquo;placeless power&dquo; while, incontrast, the very same rural locale is a &dquo;powerless place&dquo; from the perspec-tive of the rural poor (Castells & Henderson, 1987; see also Castells, 1985).The relative cosmopolitanism of rural newcomers represents a significantdeparture in the basic character of many rural populations. Today, rurallocales are transformed significantly when their populations consist ofindividuals with powerful and sustained political, economic and social tiesoutside the particular geographic area in question. This sentiment is aptlycaptured in Richard Bernstein’s (1983) reflection on contemporaryphilosophy’s use of the term:

A community or polis is not something that can be made or engineered by some form oftechne or by the administration of society... The coming into being of a type of public lifethat can strengthen solidarity, public freedom, a willingness to talk and listen, mutualdebate, and a commitment to rational persuasion presupposes the incipient forms of suchcommunal life. (Bernstein, 1983: 226)

Though this position may not reflect a complete range of thoughtfulcriticism on the concept of community, it is consistent with the conceptused by Tonnies when he distinguishes natural and rational law, the latterbeing foreign to the spirit of community. By the philosopher’s definition, anauthentic community must reflect the collective will of its members. Whilepurposive, technical rationality may, by chance, provoke the spontaneousformation of communities, there is no reason to assume that there are

knowable and invariant formulae for accomplishing this systematically.Much of the discourse on rural America in the information age calls for

greater adaptiveness and responsiveness to innovation by rural Americans.Perhaps more accurately, what seems to be advocated is the de factodisruption and, in some cases, displacement of existing rural communities.

These themes are not new, for there has long been a tension betweenindustrial capital and rural locales, and today that analysis applies to post-industrial capital as well. Rather than depict the current issues in rural




111

communications development as anomalous, the following discussiondemonstrates how they are rooted in a long history in which similar issueshave occurred. The purpose in briefly describing this history is not to

suggest that a linear progression has occurred, or anything of the sort. Quitethe contrary, a later discussion on post-industrial developments indicatesthat a sea-change in the social relations within rural areas and between ruralareas and the rest of the world is occurring. Instead, the history describedbelow is intended to show how state involvement in changes in ruralcommunication have been a part of very significant transformations insocial relations for rural Americans, a process which continues today.

Rural communications subsidies, 1862-1949

Three general arenas discussed below of state intervention into the com-munication and social relations within rural areas, and between ruralcommunities and urban capital, are the agricultural extension programs ofrural universities; the U.S. postal system, specifically its introduction ofresidential mail delivery and parcel post service to rural areas; and theintroduction of residential telephone service to rural areas. These threearenas of communications development serve to demonstrate how socio-spatial relations have been transformed in rural areas, arguably for thebetter in terms of available goods and services, but also at the expense ofweakening local community solidarity and autonomy as rural locales inAmerica have been incorporated into widening spheres of regional, na-tional, and global political economies.

In his statement before a U.S. Senate Committee, R.L. Thompson, Deanof the School of Agriculture at Purdue University in Indiana has noted that&dquo;[t]he terms ’rural’ and ’agriculture’ are no longer synonymous. Peopleliving in rural areas make their living from a variety of sources. Consistentwith this trend, only one in eleven people who live in rural areas are

farmers Due to this demographic shift, it is clear that the shrinkingagricultural sector no longer is the sole or perhaps even primary target ofthe bulk of state financing of rural communications. More than ever before,the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) involvement in ruraldevelopment provides a foundation of state support mechanisms andincentives for rural diversification. While it is true that the USDA has been

employed in the diffusion of rural telecommunication for a considerabletime already (Clearfield & Warner, 1984; Dillman, 1985; Rasmussen,




112

1989), it would only be by an extreme stretch of the imagination that onecould claim that agricultural communities remain the primary target ofmany initiatives underway today to implement and service the &dquo;informationhighways&dquo; now being laid in rural America.Of particular interest is the role of the university in this evolution. In

1862, the first of a series of federal laws to promote higher education inrural areas was approved to create an endowment to support and maintain atleast one college in each state to teach, among other subjects, &dquo;such

branches of learning as are related to agriculture&dquo;. These institutions havecome to be known as &dquo;land grant&dquo; colleges and universities. In subsequentlegislation, provisions were made to support land grant universities in

serving as &dquo;agricultural experiment stations&dquo; (1887) and later to provide&dquo;cooperative extension work&dquo; between the colleges and the surroundingfarm communities (1914). This legislation allocated funds for agriculturalcolleges in cooperation with the Department of Agriculture to promote the&dquo;instruction and practical demonstrations in agriculture and homeeconomics&dquo; to persons not attending the colleges or living in their com-munities.5 5

According to Wendell Berry (1977), an ecologist and critic of U.S. farmpolicy, the purpose behind the initial development of university agriculturalextension was to pursue and support former president Thomas Jefferson’svision of America as a &dquo;nation of farmers&dquo;. In Jefferson’s ’Notes on

Virginia’ (1784/1944), he wrote that farmers were &dquo;the chosen people ofGod, if ever He had a chosen people&dquo;, and he advocated that Americans bea nation of farmers and supporting craftspersons, and &dquo;let our workshopsremain in Europe&dquo; (p. 280). Jefferson favored an ideal of the agrarian lifeand the farm community, and he detested Alexander Hamilton’s ideal of anation of industrialism, commerce, and large cities, or what Richard

Hofstadter characterizes as Hamilton’s &dquo;unashamed devotion to the mercan-

tile and investing classes&dquo; (1948: 31-33). In this fundamental divide, whichhas been characterized as the most important struggle in American history,it would appear that Hamilton’s vision has gained the most ground, but italso seems that Jefferson’s retains greater romantic appeal and popularity(see also Bowers, 1925; Marx, 1964: 117-144; Robertson, 1980). Accord-

ing to Berry, the &dquo;land grant complex&dquo; in American agriculture has es-tablished something very different from the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation ofsmall farms. Instead, it has led to sophisticated scientific research and

development, constituting what Berry terms a &dquo;betrayal of trust&dquo; that is

&dquo;working, in effect, against the interests of the small farmers, the farm




113

communities, and the farmland&dquo; (p. 154). Citing the same trends, Newbyand Buttel (1980) suggest that large-scale agriculture is the overwhelminginfluence in setting the research agenda not only for agricultural researchand development, but for rural sociology as well (pp. 11-12). On that basis,they argue that rural sociologists must inquire about the policy implicationsof the research they do so that they do not become unwitting servants ofpowerful interests which do not necessarily serve local communities (p. 16).By extension, this critique applies to telecommunication and informationtechnology development in rural areas, in which social scientists and

agricultural extension services increasingly are involved.Along with the evolving land grant system, there have been other

extremely significant efforts to modernize rural life through communica-tions, including the marketing of products by mail. The emergence ofcatalog shopping undermined the economic stability of local rural en-

terprises, a point made in 1923 by Thorstein Veblen, who observed that themail-order houses were &dquo;quite cordially detested by right-minded country-town dealers&dquo; (p. 148). Veblen observed that as a defensive strategy ruralbusinesses sought to subvert the efforts of the mail-order houses. For

example, local shopkeepers held contests and rewarded children with prizesfor bringing in mail-order catalogs, which they would then dispose ofproperly. Small-town newspapers, which were threatened by the potentialerosion of their local advertising base through outside competition, printedattacks on the mail-order houses (Weil, 1977: 63). In response to these

challenges, the mail-order house of Montgomery Ward editorialized aboutthe &dquo;tyranny of villages&dquo; in its 1902 catalog and Sears began wrapping itscatalogs and packages in plain brown paper to avoid having them identifiedin the mail (p. 74).

In effect, the growth of mail-order business initiated a very different formof country-city relations. As its name implies, the &dquo;mail-order&dquo; business

relied on the postal system. However, until new postal laws began to beinstituted at the turn of the century, the prospect of significant success waslimited. Until that time, rural post offices were visited once or twice a week

by farmers and that is how rural dwellers received their mail (Fuller, 1972:75), but in 1891 the U.S. Postmaster John Wanamaker experimented withdirect delivery to residences in selected small towns and villages (Fuller,1964: 19). Over the course of the next decade, farmers began to demandrural mail delivery, arguing that their postage payments amounted to a taxto pay for door-to-door service in the cities and that rural residents deserved

equal treatment (pp. 32-33).




114

In its deliberations over whether to institute rural mail delivery services,Congress debated mainly over the high cost of developing the necessaryroads and the cost of salaries to mail carriers for delivering to a relativelysmall number of homes per mile in comparison with urban service (Fuller,1964: 21-25). With the number of post offices in the U.S. peaking at

around the turn of the century, and with 60% of the population living inrural areas at that time (Fuller, 1964: 260), there was a large constituency ofU.S. citizens who could apply political pressure on Congress to instituterural delivery service. Even more powerful interests were pushing in thisdirection, namely, the mail-order houses and national and regionalnewspapers and magazines. By 1902, Congress yielded to collective

economic pressures and passed legislation to establish the &dquo;rural free

delivery&dquo; of letters and periodicals as a part of the postal system, followedshortly by legislation to institute the delivery of parcels as a part of ruralmail service.6 This made it possible for mail-order houses and numerousother suppliers of goods to have easy access to the vast market of farmersand farm families in the early part of this century. But rural free deliveryand parcel post services should be considered in a larger context ofeconomic changes, as Thorstein Veblen has done:

The factors of change have been such as: increased facilities of transport and communica-tion ; increasing use of advertising, largely made possible by facilities of transport andcommunication; increased size and combination of the business concerns engaged in thewholesale trade, as packers, jobbers, warehouse-concerns handling farm products;increased resort to package-goods, brands, and trade-marks, advertised on a liberal planwhich runs over the heads of the retailers; increased employment of chain-store methodsand agencies; increased dependence of local bankers on the greater credit establishmentsof the financial centers. It will be seen, of course, that this new growth finally runs back toand rests upon changes of a material sort, in the industrial arts, and more immediately onchanges in the means of transport and communication. (Veblen, 1923: 154)

The significance of these structural changes in social relations is great, andthey should be seen not only as perceived benefits from the perspective ofthe many farmers who pressed for the new laws, but also as acts by the stateto subsidize a significant cost to large-scale commercial enterprises wantingaccess to the vast rural market. In this respect, the ultimate failure of

opposition by local rural merchants should not be overlooked.The introduction of residential mail services in rural America led to a

decline in the number of rural post offices, which meant that an importantmeeting place (the post office) for community members was no longer inuse. Rural residents could now receive at home many of the goods forwhich they had previously traveled into town. These developments served




115

to weaken local cultural ties while increasing economic and cultural

dependency on regional and national centers of commerce. We now turn tothe subject of the federal subsidization of telephone service in those sameplaces, which has perhaps been the most important arena of state involve-ment in the restructuring of rural communications and city-country relationssince the innovations in mail service.

In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Rural ElectrificationAdministration (REA) as a part of a general unemployment relief program,and in the following year Congress gave the REA statutory authorization.The REA is a publicly funded lending bank, established to assist financiallyin the extension of electric service to rural areas. The initial reason forfederal support in rural electrification was that most of the public utilities inthe country served only high density areas and found serving rural areas tobe unprofitable. Through the REA, government loans are made at lowinterest rates to capitalize the construction of facilities to deliver electricityto farmers and other rural residents, thus making the rural electricitybusiness more attractive economically (USDA, 1986: 1). The REA’s

mission was expanded in 1949, the year in which Congress authorized theagency to provide financial assistance for the development of rural

telephone service and thus make possible a near-universal telephonenetwork in the United States.7 ..

The subsidization of rural telephony can be seen as an extension of thesame objectives pursued in the establishment of rural free delivery andparcel post services. Among the resulting changes has been that &dquo;mail-

order&dquo; operations now receive more orders by telephone than by mail.Today, not only are urban-centered businesses able to reach rural areas

through an efficient combination of the telephone, parcel post and privateexpress delivery services, but some companies are now taking advantage ofthe same systems of communications and transportation by setting upnational business operations in rural areas. Among the chief business

attractions in operating a mail- and telephone-order business in a rural

locale are the lower real estate and construction costs compared with urbancenters, and the low cost of labor in depressed rural areas. Such operationsare not quaint little country stores, but high-profile, multi-million dollarbusinesses such as L.L. Bean, Inc., which rely on cheap labor and sophisti-cated computer and telecommunications facilities (Montgomery, 1984;’Enhanced PBX Systems’, 1986; ’Fostering Advanced Telecommunica-tions’, 1989)..

It would be misguided to conclude that the progressive-minded social




116

innovations in communications over the past nearly 130 years have notcontributed in marked and measurable ways to improving certain aspects ofthe quality of life in rural America, but this has not occurred without

significant social costs. It is no longer possible to look upon rural areas asbeing relatively self-sufficient and autonomous. Rural areas, no matter howdistant from a metropolitan center, increasingly must participate in thenational and international exchange economy. Today, there is an expandingrange of enterprises which are &dquo;location-independent&dquo;, as the changingnature of work in the information age reveals (Calabrese, 1988; In Press).Although there are many conceptual and practical difficulties of measuringthe &dquo;informal economy&dquo;, constituted increasingly by information-handlingoccupations (e.g., U.S. Congress, OTA, 1985; Miller, 1987; Pratt, 1987),many authors suggest that in both the U.S. and Western Europe there is agrowing element of economically affluent and highly educated technicaland professional &dquo;teleworkers&dquo;, many of whom are newcomers to ruralareas (Calabrese, 1988; Gillespie and Robins, 1989; Herbers, 1986; Johan-sen and Fuguitt, 1984; Lapping, et al., 1989; ’Managing the Rural Renais-sance,’ 1986; ’On the Trail of the White-Collar Settlers’, 1986; Qvortrup, InPress). Growth in these occupational sectors seems to be a major impetusbehind the continued upgrading of the communications infrastructure, sincemany of those occupations rely on their having access to advanced telecom-munication services.

Post-industrial promises: The promise of rural community

Today, as so many analysts suggest, telecommunications figure centrally inthe new paradigm of post-industrialism, for such an infrastructure is

required to draw together the networks of production spanning the globe.Piore and Sabel (1984) suggest that the model of industrial productionepitomized by the factory assembly line is an economic burden that dragson the competitive potential of the corporations of the U.S. and othercountries in which it is entrenched. The inflexibility of the Fordist mode ofproduction, they observe, is being abandoned in some lauded instances infavor of what they characterize as a narrowing gap between worker andmanager, the introduction of innovative technologies designed to unleashrather than stifle the creativity of workers, and a renewed emphasis onflexible, craft-based and skill-intensive production in place of Taylorizedtechniques.8 While different analysts make competing claims about the




117

meaning of these emerging developments (e.g., Hall & Jacques, 1989;Harvey, 1989; Clarke, 1991), most agree that significant changes in thenature and structure of capital accumulation are occurring. In most

analyses, new developments in telecommunication and information technol-ogy are seen as providing a necessary, though perhaps not sufficient,foundation for an emerging international regime of accumulation. In theremainder of this section, implications of these changes - both actual andproposed - are discussed, with a particular emphasis on the significance forthe future of rural America.A distinguishing feature of transnational corporations (TNCs) today is

their vigilance in hunting across the globe for temporary advantages in taxstructures, cheap land and labor, lax ecological standards, and amenablesupport services. In preserving the advantage of being footloose, TNCs aremuch less accountable to local labor demands. Capital’s newly invigoratedmobility and labor’s continued relative immobility points to new spatialdivisions in the mode of production whereby centers of command andcontrol can be tucked safely out of reach of labor strife and the degradationof the immediate environment which often coincide with industrial produc-tion. In an enlightening discussion of emerging patterns in the spatialdivision of labor in late capitalism, Annalee Saxenian (1984, 1985) charac-terizes Silicon Valley as a transitional model of the social relations of post-industrial society. A well known feature of labor in the Valley is that unionsare weak-to-nonexistent. In stark contrast with the mythical fair treatmentand high degree of concern with the quality of life of employees attributedto Valley firms, the post-industrial utopia has been shown to be a magnetfor cheap immigrant labor working for firms which show little regard forthe environment or for the mental and physical health of their workers (seealso, Rogers & Larsen, 1986; Hayes, 1989).

In Silicon Valley, the new class of technical, professional, and

managerial workers fulfills its dreams of living in semi-rural bliss, but thedark side of these dreams is class exploitation and ecological degradation.Ironically, it is in the name of &dquo;environmentalism&dquo; that the &dquo;new ruralists&dquo;

have sought to preserve spacious surroundings by introducing local landzoning policies to limit residential growth. Not coincidentally, these

policies are designed to force low-income wage workers to live outside theValley and commute to work over increasingly greater distances as land andhousing prices climb. A result is that added commuter traffic contributes

substantially to auto pollution in the valley. In recent years, the economy ofSilicon Valley has suffered due to the fact that much of the unskilled wage




118

labor which had been done in the Valley is now done more cheaply abroad,particularly in Third World countries. The result is the emerging reductionin the demand for local laborers and the resulting restructuring of the Valleyas &dquo;an elite control and research center&dquo; (Saxenian, 1984: 190). In this newphase of development, Silicon Valley’s worldwide status as the paradig-matic post-industrial metropolis is more fully realized. Hazardous produc-tion processes can now be relegated to less desirable residential locales,whether they be in the U.S. or abroad, and leverage over labor is increaseddue to greater capital mobility. Due to the availability of new technologiesfor information management and control, affluent &dquo;commuters&dquo; can set upshop in one location and travel along &dquo;information highways&dquo; to distantemployers and clients, with hazardous production phases or other class-based misfortunes out of sight and mind. The experience of Silicon Valleyprovides a valuable lesson for transnational capital: It is now increasinglyunnecessary to co-locate research and development, management, and laborin the same city or even the same country. Contrary to post-industrialclaims of the disappearance of the working class, in the global village theworking class simply is hidden. Through the benefits of communicationtechnology, class intermingling and the politicization of a jointly inhabitedphysical space can be minimized.

Today, global telecommunications are used in facilitating lightning-quickresponses by modem TNCs to the myriad political and economic oppor-tunities brouðfil on by global deregulation, &dquo;free trade&dquo; agreements, &dquo;free

enterprise zones&dquo;, 24-hour financial trading, and various other develop-ments. However, while the mode of production may be changing from ahighly centralized form to that of a physically decentralized one, it should

not be concluded that the mechanisms of control are loosening their gripover the accumulation process (see, for example, Harvey, 1989; Clarke,1990). Instead, as David Harvey (1989) argues, there is an increased

tightening of capitalist control as a result of &dquo;dispersal, geographicalmobility, and flexible responses in labour markets, labour processes, andconsumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses of institutional, product,and technological innovation&dquo; (p. 159). While corporations increasingly&dquo;hire out&dquo; to fulfill services which had previously been done in-house, thelack of job security, work place safety standards, and health insurance posean alarming problem. The euphemism of &dquo;flexible staffing&dquo; (e.g., Stackel,1987; Femberg, 1991) is a boon to corporate profits and an ugly threat tothe livelihoods of an increasing number of marginal labor pools (Pollock,1986; Calabrese, 1988, In Press). With a publicly financed rural telecom-




119

munications infrastructure in place, disenfranchised rural workforces can betreated as any one of a number of possible labor pools in TNCs’ vigilantsearches for temporary advantage in the domestic and international labormarket, both urban and rural. Unlike the days of the coal mining &dquo;companytown&dquo; of industrial capitalism, the &dquo;placeless power&dquo; of post-industrialsociety permits corporations to treat labor worldwide as modules to be

plugged and unplugged into the circuits of capital.The economic arguments for introducing advanced communication

technologies in rural areas have been a theme in federal policy for manyyears (e.g., U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1976), andthey have become more prominent in recent years due to growing aware-ness of continued economic decline in many farm communities. Among theprincipal areas of interest and activity for rural telecommunication develop-ment today are distance education, telemedicine, and new business develop-ment. Recently, attention has increased with a number of general proposalsas well as new federal legislation. In the remaining discussion, three keydocuments are highlighted, one produced by the federal government, one bythe private sector, and the third a new comprehensive piece of federallegislation which includes important provisions for information and

telecommunication technologies.In 1988, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunica-

tions and Information Administration (NTIA) published a major reportentitled NTIA Telecom 2000 (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1988), whichmakes sweeping recommendations for four broad areas of telecommunica-tions, namely, ( 1 ) telephone and information services; (2) mass media

offerings; (3) international telecommunications; and (4) critical humanservices (p. 8). One chief area of concern in the report is rural development:

Our nation has always been committed to making communications technologies, frompostal to telephone to radio and television, available in rural areas. We must maintain thiscommitment and consider how modem telecommunications and information technologiesand systems can fuel rural economic and cultural growth. (p. 9)

The report suggests that through innovation in telecommunications, ruralAmerica will become a part of the &dquo;national neighborhood&dquo;. The principalrole seen for government is one of establishing conditions desirable for theurban entrepreneurs to relocate to rural locations. Among the recommenda-tions made for achieving this end is the pursuit of policies to encouragetelephone companies to offer new services in rural areas; to consider waysin which enhanced telecommunications (e.g., fiber optics, microwave




120

networks, and teleports) might be deployed to attract industry to rural areas;and to encourage telecommunications companies to assist in rural economicdevelopment and to provide training and technical assistance to small ruraltelephone companies (pp. 13-14). Chief among the &dquo;challenges for theinformation age&dquo;, according to the NTIA report, is the strengthening of U.S.international competitiveness (p. 5), although it is not made clear exactlyhow the installation of a more sophisticated telecommunications infrastruc-ture in rural locations will strengthen U.S. competitiveness abroad. Onething that is clear is that the nationalistic fervor with which this imperativeis being advanced seems to be lost on the many transnational corporationswho will gladly move their operations to other countries to escape un-favorable tax status or to exploit cheaper land and labor elsewhere.

In a 1989 report prepared in book form for the Ford Foundation and theRural Economic Policy Program of the Aspen Institute, Edwin Parker,Heather Hudson, Don Dillman and Andrew Roscoe present a perspectivewhich explicitly endorses the views of NTIA Telecom 2000. The book,entitled Rural America in the Information Age ( 1989), resembles the NTIAreport in that it does not advocate a laissez faire role for government, butinstead promotes strong state involvement in the subsidization and coordina-tion of rural telecommunications development. According to the authors, inthe absence of policies to pave the way to a comparable telecommunica-tions infrastructure, rural communities will continue to suffer from a &dquo;majorstructural barrier to economic expansion&dquo;, meaning new industries will notbe attracted to those areas (pp. 87-88).Among the general recommendations of the report is that rural telecom-

munications policies must be designed to &dquo;empower rural communities withan equal opportunity to participate in the national economy and determinetheir own destiny&dquo; (p. 90). With what appear to be the best of intentions, thereport lends itself to romantic and unlikely notions about local identity andautonomy through the use of such terms as &dquo;empowerment&dquo; and

&dquo;community&dquo;. The inspirational claim that &dquo;[t]elecommunications can

foster a sense of community&dquo; (Parker, et al., 1989: 31) does not make asense of community, particularly since the report does not tell us what thenewcomers and the indigenous elites are to have in common with in-

digenous poor who are disenfranchised by the transformations to post-industrial ruralism. It is a far stretch of the imagination to see how the lattergroups will be empowered. Consistent with the contemporary genre of

pastoral idealism, a green and pleasant version of country life is a part ofthe overall image portrayed in the report:




121

Many rural areas are discovering just how important quality-of-life attributes can be inspurring economic development. Increasingly, &dquo;footloose&dquo; industries, tourists, retirees andowners of second homes are moving to high-amenity rural areas because of the pleasantnatural environments, recreational facilities, friendly neighborhoods, and less frantic pace.(Parker, et al., 1989: 47-48)

While very appealing, the descriptions do not speak to such issues as whyfederal taxpayers should wish to subsidize the technological infrastructurenecessary to &dquo;empower&dquo; owners of second homes. Nor are the visionsclouded by the seemingly irrelevant issue of exactly how the installation ofcommunication technology leads to a sense of local community.

Recently, Congress passed new legislation in an attempt to accelerateinformation-age development in rural America while recognizing that thetelecommunications infrastructure is only one necessary component in anoverall development strategy. According to the Senate report accompanyingthe legislation when it was proposed, the new laws would address twomajor financial problems in rural America:

(1) lack of access to capital for small businesses and (2) rural infrastructure needs fortelecommunications and water and sewer systems. It is focused on bringing rural Americainto the 21st century on an equal basis with urban America so there won’t be twoAmericas - one urban, surging ahead, the other rural, lagging behind.9

The Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 199010 takes abroad and potentially balanced approach to promoting rural development,although much depends on how the spirit of this legislation is captured inpractice. The new rural economic development legislation focuses on anumber of fronts simultaneously, including the provision of federal sub-sidies for a variety of public utility services, small business development,state and local government programs, data collection on rural America, a&dquo;National Rural Information Center Clearinghouse&dquo;, and various other

forms of loans to be channeled through several different federal, state andlocal agencies. The importance of communications looms larger than theother aspects of the bill, understandably, given the interest in setting upinformation-age businesses in rural areas.A principal goal of the new legislation pertaining to telecommunications

would be to shift from an analog transmission and switching system to asystem with digital transmission and switching capacity. Beyond infrastruc-ture development, new REA programs will focus on three general targetsfor increased telecommunications access, to be achieved through REAloans to rural local telephone companies, namely, education, health care andbusiness. In education, funding would be provided through the REA to




122

expand access to communication technology to serve rural counties. Inhealth care, rural hospitals would have greater access to medical data andexpertise from teaching hospitals through telecommunications. In generalbusiness, funds will be provided to establish communication links to

enhance business centers in rural areas. Along with the setting up ofbusiness communication links, a &dquo;rural business incubator fund&dquo; will beadministered by the REA to create office facilities

in which small businesses can share premises, support staff, computers, software,hardware, telecommunications terminal equipment, machinery, janitorial services,utilities, or other overhead expenses, and where such businesses can receive technicalassistance, financial advice, business planning services or other support.l I

The legislation extends the Rural Electrification Administration’s involve-ment with university cooperative extension services by establishing a B

university-based rural economic and business development program to

assist individuals in creating new businesses, including cooperatives, or to assist existingbusinesses, and to assist such businesses regarding advanced telecommunications,computer technologies, technical or management assistance, business and financial

planning, and other related matters, and to assist community leaders in communityeconomic analysis and strategic planning. 1’) 2

A principal argument made in justifying the new changes has been the needto reverse the economic decline of rural America, a point discussed in theSenate report accompanying the legislative proposals Reports of poverty,of small farm foreclosures, and of the lack of health care and educationalinstitutions comparable to those available in metropolitan areas do justifystate involvement in rural welfare. The significant gamble, however, is thatthese problems will be eliminated through massive state investment in

enhancing business prospects for a new elite rather than the disenfranchisedrural natives. The wager is that the benefits of these enhancements will, atsome point, &dquo;trickle-down&dquo; to the rural poor. As arguments supporting thenew laws suggest, the pursuit of the pastoral ideal by urban and suburbanAmericans seems worthy of state subsidy:

Manufacturers like a rural place for a lot of reasons: one, there is space, and usually theamenities are attractive. And so if other things are available, like water and telephoneservice of course - and schools and hospitals are adequate - they would prefer to come toa rural place rather than land in downtown District of Columbia.l4

Beyond the question of paying for industrial re-location to greener pastures,a key danger which already exists and which has not been sufficientlyanticipated in much of the policy discourse and the actual legislation is that




123

the federal subsidies threaten to further weaken local community self-determination. A long term danger to rural populations is the developmentof dependencies which are vulnerable to TNCs who may suddenly pull upstakes in response to labor, tax, or other local demands, a pattern alreadyfamiliar in many parts of the Third World. Given the low levels of invest-ment in setting up data entry shops, for instance, the net loss to the TNC inabandoning a particular labor site is negligible. In the meantime, the federalgovernment has made it more attractive for a large national or transnationalfirm to move into rural areas, exploit the low real estate, construction, andlabor costs, and drive land prices beyond affordability for native residents.Communication technology is, in this scenario, a necessary and convenienttool for rural gentrification and colonization by a professional and technicalintelligentsia with superior means for taking control of the social order ofrural society.As we can see from these documents, the term &dquo;community&dquo; can be

highly misleading when it is used to refer to an incongruous amalgamationof people grouped together by virtue of technocratic &dquo;development&dquo;policies. Apart from the questionable likelihood of administratively design-ing &dquo;communities&dquo;, it is difficult to see how the presence or absence ofauthentic solidarity, public freedom, and commitment to rational persuasion(Bernstein, 1983) can be meaningfully assessed within the brief span oftime typically allowed before the obligatory &dquo;evaluation studies&dquo; are

implemented and the outside consultants move along to the next develop-ment project. This impulse to provide quick results, coupled with the desireto give the appearance of a grassroots initiative (in contrast to the

bureaucratic reality), is not particular to the experiments of the UnitedStates (e.g., Jensen and Qvortrup, 1991). This is not to say there is no valuein what is accomplished, or that bureaucratic solutions to the problems ofrural America, Western Europe, or other &dquo;post-industrial&dquo; societies are

valueless. Rather, it is to say that by assigning technocratic projects with thelabel &dquo;community&dquo; we gut the term of anything resembling its philosophicalmeaning, and we delude ourselves into thinking that what is being achievedin rural development resembles anything like a voluntary commitment tosustaining communal life. Whether by design or default, the term

&dquo;community&dquo; now has little value besides as a public relations tool, even inthe rural milieu from which it originated. The class, race, and genderdivisions of labor and inequities of rural America do not disappear becauseplanners glossed over them with what might be the most useful buzzwordof the information age: community.




124

Conclusions

In sum, the promise of the new technologies for rural America is that ruraldwellers will become participants in the information age rather than befurther displaced by it. But the question remains whether the new ruralismsimply provides new lifestyle opportunities for today’s urban and suburbandwellers and new business opportunities for footloose industries, which willonly be answered with the passage of time. Nevertheless, a prima facie casehas been presented here that conditions are being created to make it pos-sible to realize these outcomes. Rural natives are highly vulnerable to socialcontrol by the newly arriving technical and professional intelligentsia withwhom they must coexist. While the migration of new enterprises to rurallocales is not, in principle, an idea which necessarily leads to the abuse ofpeople or the environment, it is questionable whether public support shouldbe given to such purposes without comparable commitments from privatesources who otherwise may hold no lasting commitment to existing localcommunities. If telecommunications development is needed to attract IBMto set up a plant in rural Vermont, then why doesn’t IBM spend the money?This significant matter has not been politicized sufficiently.

Clearly, the extent to which one can maintain community identity is no

longer determined solely, and perhaps not even predominantly, by the factthat one lives in a certain spatial locale. Consequently, a contemporaryconcept of &dquo;community&dquo; has evolved to include not only spatially-definedcommunities, but also spatially separated but electronically interconnected&dquo;virtual&dquo; communities. This necessity is undeniable. But let us not go to theextreme, as some information age punditry seems to do, of concluding thattelecommunications has made, or can make, spatially-defined identityirrelevant. A sense of commitment to the place where one lives remains anecessity even in the information age, despite cybernetic fantasies to thecontrary, and it is that place which is in danger of further evolving into atwo-tiered society of highly mobile and affluent cosmopolitans and rela-tively immobile and unskilled localites providing a service underclass.

Democratic, autonomous communities, it would seem, must by their verynature be beyond the reach of the state. We cannot assume that the state hasany ability to legislate &dquo;communities&dquo;, nor is there any reason to expect thisof the state, for community is a sociological category which is characterizedby the presence of folkways, familial concord, religion, and collective will.These features are, it generally is acknowledged, the products of sharedcommitment, for better or worse, and they do not lend themselves to the




125

mobile privatization which characterizes the new class of urban andsuburban dwellers who are charmed by the thought of rural living. AsRaymond Williams has noted, the malleable word &dquo;community&dquo; is warmlypersuasive.

Notes

1. ’Special Message from the President of the United States Transmitting the Report of theCountry Life Commission’, in Report of the Country Life Commission, 60th Congress,Senate, 2nd Session (1909), p. 9.

2. ’Testimony before United States Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, andForestry relative to "Rural Development Issues, Needs, Problems & Opportunities"’, inU.S. Congress, Senate, Hearings before the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, andForestry and the Subcommittee on Rural Development and Electrification, 101st

Congress, 1 st Session (1989), pp. 85-86.3. This analysis applies not only to the new economic sectors which are making inroads in

rural America, but also to the agricultural sector, which relies heavily on a base ofscientific and technological development and operates under the industrial principles ofspecialization (of crop production), the division of labor, and an extensive marketing,distribution, and processing infrastructure (Kenney et al., 1989).

4. ’Statement of Robert L. Thompson, Dean, School of Agriculture, Purdue University,West Lafayette, Indiana’, in Hearings before the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition,and Forestry, United States Senate, and the Subcommittee on Rural Development andRural Electrification, United States Senate, 101 st Congress, Senate, 1st Session ( 1989),p. 186.

5. 12 Statutes 503-504 (1862); 24 Statutes 440-442 (1887); 38 Statutes 372-374 (1914).6. 32 Statutes 164-167 (1902); 37 Statutes 557-559 (1912).7. Executive Order No. 7037 (May 11, 1935); 49 Statute 1363 (1936); 64 Statute 948

(1949).8. Widely recognized, for instance, is the example of Italy, known as a site of significant

innovation in local industrial strategies, particularly the Northern region of Emilia-Romagna (e.g., Piore & Sabel, 1984; Zeitlin, 1989; Goodman, 1989). As Harvey (1989)and others suggest, while these new strategies do much to destabilize monopoly labor,they also introduce newer, regressive labor practices such as the reintroduction of

sweatshops.9. Senate Report 101-73 to accompany the Rural Partnerships Act of 1989 (S. 1036),

101 st Congress, Senate, 1 st Session (1989), p. 1.

10. Public Law 101-624, October 23, 1990.11. Ibid., section 502(a)(3).12. Ibid., section 502(g)(1).13. Senate Report 101-73, pp. 7-12.14. ’Statement of Bob Bergland, Executive Vice President, National Rural Electric

Cooperative Association’, in Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Conservation,

Credit, and Rural Development of the Committee on Agriculture, Part 1, 101st

Congress, 1 st Session (1989), p. 116.




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