Effects of communication

Effects of communication technology on local communities

History

The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was established to devise a long-term solution to the seemingly intractable problem of extending electricity to rural Americans during the New Deal. As electricity becomes more common in rural areas, so does automobiles and telephones. However, because of high cost of electricity, cars and phones were far more common on farms than electricity; thirty-three percent of farms had a car and forty percent had a telephone, but less than ten percent had electric power by the end of the 1920s.

New technologies for communication purposes that are affecting local communities are phones, cell phones, and computers.

Computers have been around for about 60 years. The first computer was invented in the late 1940s.

Community Use

Common examples of communication technologies for communication purposes are telephones, cell phones, and computers.

The telephone brought people closer together in the sense that distance did not inhibit a phone call, but it also had an unanticipated effect, according to some early studies that people spent less time actually in each other’s presence. Starting in the 1890s people began to replace visiting with telephone calls, which were briefer and less personal. It is tempting to use such evidence to decide that human beings are becoming progressively alienated from one another, and that machines have interposed themselves between them. Rather than conclude that networked communication substitutes for personal contact, one can just as easily argue that they amplify and preserve already established relationships. One can conclude the telephone was used to alleviate loss of contact caused by increasing demands on people’s time to those in the community.

Millions of people go online daily. Rather than isolating users in a virtual world, the Internet extends communities in the real world. The Internet is used to connect people in individualized and flexible social networks rather than in fixed and grounded groups. Some dedicate most of their lives to the online community. The Internet supplants activities, like watching television, rather than other forms of social life.

……. (to be continue, click here)