University of Minnesota Moment: Rural Internet Access

Transcription

[Announcer]: I'm Rick Moore with the University of Minnesota Moment. U of M professors John Sullivan and Eugene Borgida recently concluded a study of two Minnesota cities that have taken different paths in the way Internet access is offered. In Grand Rapids, local leaders pushed for broad public access to the Net, while another similar size city simply let the marketplace dictate Internet accessibility.

[Sullivan]: We are very interested in how people who lived in these communities thought about the Internet and how they used it and whether those thoughts and use patterns changed over time.

[Moore]: Borgida and Sullivan say that cities that invest in Internet access will have a leg up on other communities.

[Borgida]: In Grand Rapids, people with money, with high incomes, were able to participate very easily. In addition, people who were civically engaged, people who were involved in the community, knew about the community, but did not have significant income participated at about the same level over time. After the project was begun, after a few years, they went straight up to the same level of participation in Internet activity as the high income groups. In the control community on the other hand, which did not provide a community-wide access, but rather took much more of a market-driven approach, only the high-income groups participated at that level. The low-income groups, no matter how civically involved they were, or how engaged they were in the community, participated at a much lower level, so we found a very significant difference that became greater over time in the two communities.

[Moore]: For the University of Minnesota Moment, I'm Rick Moore.