12/03/08 05:27 pm ET
Geoff Daily, a blogger for AppRising, has some advice for the Obama administration on what priorities it should tackle first. As quoted in a Dec. 3 article on the Web site operated by the alternative newspaper The Independent Weekly, based in Durham, N.C., Daily said:
Instead of thinking health care, business, government, education, broadband, we need to put broadband first and say, we've got issues, how can we solve them through connectivity?
The argument is that broadband will create jobs by building the nation's infrastructure needed to support business growth. The problem is that it is still only available in urban and suburban areas.
Why is broadband important? According to John Horrigan, an associate director of research at the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington:
Let's go through some Internet activities to illustrate what I mean by these two phases of what [it] means to be connected.I. Health & medical information online
II. News on the internet
III. Science news and information
IV. Politics
V. Getting help with major life decisionsWe see that, in time, people are being drawn into richer engagement with the Internet. This sets the stage for the next phase of what it means to be connected to the Internet.
For those with broadband, "The Internet will become, for many people, a seamless part of their lives," Horrigan concludes.
COMMENTS
Connectivity doesn't solve the problem of healthcare. Has obesity gone down since connectivity gone up...no. Are doctors seeing patients less frequently because of people's access to health and medical information? Have there been any fewer cases of any disease or condition because of access to this information? If there is any credible support for the argument of connectivity being more important than healthcare, I am interested in reading it.
Preston 12/04/08 01:05 pm ET