Rodent Regatta

IT’S THE ”UBIQUITOUS AND INEXPENSIVE WiFi NOTEBOOK”

Yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered, a report on a college town in the state of Georgia that’s installing WiFi over the whole downtown district. The college is paying for it (only $85K). Of course this is a great idea, it’ll make the college much more attractive and the town more useful. But they totally have the wrong idea about what it will be used for (or ATC asked the wrong people). It will be used for email, instant messaging, reading news, and blogging (and probably porn too). It’s not just about finding out what’s happening in the town or at the college—it’s about what’s happening in the world, and creating stuff that’s part of the world. People still think of the Internet as something like TV, so by extrapolation of course town-level WiFi must be like local TV, but geez folks, get a clue—the Internet is two-way not one-way. [Scripting News]