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posted by chromas on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the less-is-more,-more-or-less dept.

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

When people hear "Appalachia," stereotypes and even slurs often immediately jump to mind, words like "backwards," "ignorant," "hillbilly" or "yokel." But Appalachian attitudes about technology's role in daily life are extremely sophisticated—and turn out to be both insightful and useful in a technology-centric society.

[...] In a recent study, my colleagues and I used focus groups and interviews to explore how people use technology in rural Appalachia. These open-ended methods allow participants to discuss their experiences and opinions in their own terms. For instance, most technology surveys don't ask people why they don't own the latest phone or computer—they just assume people would if they could.

Those studies miss key insights our research was able to identify and explore. When we gave people a chance to tell their own stories about technology, we most often heard about two themes.

The first, which we called "resistance," appeared in people's doubts about the concept that more technology is always better. They also carefully considered whether the potential usefulness of new technologies was worth the privacy sacrifices inherently required to use them.

People also described their intentional choices about how much technology to use and for what purposes—as well as intentional choices not to use technology in some situations. We called this theme "navigation."

Source: https://theconversation.com/resisting-technology-appalachian-style-94245


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 06 2018, @01:04AM (3 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 06 2018, @01:04AM (#663215) Journal

    If you divide the turf into urban and rural, then a city of 50,000 counts as urban. If you want to claim there's a big difference between it and a megalopolis, I'll agree, but that's not what's being asserted in the summary or in the early parts of the discussion.

    P.S.: Different 50,000 cities are more different than are different megalopolises. But they're still all urban. So is a city of 25,000. In fact, I'd go so far as to call a town of 10,000 more urban than rural...and I've lived in both.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday April 06 2018, @02:29AM (2 children)

    Reread the thread. I didn't say urban vs rural. I said "extremely urban" and "major cities".

    I'd go so far as to call a town of 10,000 more urban than rural...and I've lived in both.

    As have I and I can say without hesitation that this is so far from true it isn't even laughable anymore. If you're not seeing it, you don't see the real differences between urbanites and non-urbanites to begin with.

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 06 2018, @06:06AM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 06 2018, @06:06AM (#663290) Journal

      Rural is outside of town, not within town, even a small one.

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