Rural broadband and the politics of "good enough"
Rural broadband has been our list of episode topics for a long time. This week, we finally have the conversation with one of the leading scholars on the politics of Internet access.
Democracy Works · Christopher Ali, Candis Watts Smith, Jenna Spinelle, Chris Beem
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Show Notes
COVID-19 showed just how essential high-speed Internet is to our everyday lives. It determines how many of us work, learn, and access news and entertainment. Yet, millions of Americans do not have reliable access to broadband and millions more can't afford to pay for the service that's available to them.
Christopher Ali, the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State, unpacks these issues in his book Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity and joins us this week for a discussion about market failures, how communities across the country are democratizing Internet access and how the federal government is now starting to step in thanks to funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in November 2021.
We also discuss some of Ali's more recent work on the relationship between broadband deserts and news deserts, and how the combination impacts democratic citizenship.
Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity
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