When I first arrived here in 2002, I had a Verizon cell phone on a plan called something like All Across America. Since I was in fact driving my VW Westy all across America, it was perfect for me. I remember getting a call from the lovely Lisa in California one evening while I was camping beside the Clearwater River just east of Missoula, Montana. My phone worked fine there, but when I got to Metamora, nothing. It was like Metamora was not part of the plan. So it is today when it comes to high-speed Internet access. Metamora is not part of the plan.
High-speed Internet access is something we need in Metamora, like immediately. When the purchase of the MacLyn campground and campus is complete some time soon, the Whitewater Canal Byway Association will not be able to operate anywhere near as efficiently without a high-speed hook-up. Since this is a five-county regional effort, it seems to me high-speed Internet will be needed for administration as well as promotion.
Business runs on high-speed Internet.
Shopkeepers in Metamora itself are operating at a disadvantage to their counterparts in towns which have high-speed Internet. While it will cost them more for the service, it is a legitimate business expense and if used — I was going to say ‘wisely,’ but just used is enough — it means business, more business, at least potentially. And that’s what shopkeepers in Metamora deserve and should be demanding, the potential of making more money with e-commerce.
It isn’t really that we should have, it is more that we have to have it. Today, traffic on the Internet demands high speed. It just assumes you have high speed. The axis has shifted in the past couple of years, a subtle change and for people who don’t use computers, an invisible one, but you see it everywhere on the Internet.
Here’s a quick tale of woe: Yesterday I tried to listen to a tutorial which was less than two minutes long and for every two seconds of sound, I got— something like:” Hi, I’m Bob Ga.” Gone! Twenty seconds later my land-line connection had gathered enough data to blurt out, “glione. I’ll be your.” Gone again!
By my figuring I needed 20 seconds to get two seconds worth of tutoring, which at that rate could honestly be called merely a ‘toot.’ The lesson was 114 seconds long. I’m not good at math but by my rough estimate that would have been way too long. With high-speed Internet access, tutorials happen in real time.
Since Metamora does not have high-speed Internet service available to its many computer users (‘many’ is more than ‘several’, I hope), Metamora cannot quite operate in that virtual world of real time. (Virtual real-time, passive-aggressive behavior, what an a-contradictory world we live in.)
But maybe the strongest point in favor of establishing high-speed Internet in Metamora is education. With it we, the people who live here, can take advantage of the vast and growing free library of educational opportunities available on the World Wide Web. I was too frustrated to finish that tutorial, therefore I am a living example of the power of ignorance over intelligence, ignorance, in this case, in the form of a 46567 bps, low-speed hook-up.
Not having high-speed Internet available is detrimental to the intelligence of our citizenry and to our ability to partake in the wild world of e-commerce. What it really comes down to is Metamora’s staying on par with Brookville, Batesville, Connersville and the rest of the ‘villes’ when it comes to technology.
