A while back Alex wrote about the NCTE, CCCC and WPA obsession with access, and Jeff picked up with some nice thoughts as well. To recap briefly, these organizations spend way too much effort worrying about access to technology that just isn’t an issue. Notably, Alex made an exception for relative differences in available internet connection speeds. Two articles on Slashdot last week hit the same topic. Broadband in the US sucks, and rural broadband sucks even more. For example, WIU’s internet connection is maxed out, like several of the cases mentioned in the article, and local telcos are simply not interested in installing the infrastructure that would enable Western to buy more bandwidth. From home, I have trouble with videoconferencing and other bandwidth-intensive applications, since our upstream connection is just not that robust.
While I obviously agree there’s a problem, I think we need a little sense of history. Cheap consumer-level broadband has only been around about 10 years. That’s not a very long time, and without a doubt the simultaneous explosion of mobile phones has affected the development of infrastructure. Many things could make a huge difference—a change in regulatory climate, improvement in wireless technology, or increased investment in infrastructure (perhaps back on the table because of the Minneapolis bridge disaster).
In the meantime, what should we do? Neither duplicating the CCCC/WPA’s handwringing nor a typical Dvorak’s overreaction (“web-based applications cannot be trusted”) will address this problem. There are infrastructure-based approaches–wider uses of caching servers and load balancing–but those can’t fix everything. Moving fewer bits helps immensely, and that’s one of the reasons I push web standards, especially modular development; cutting out tag soup and converting inline scripts and styles to external resources which are loaded only when needed (when a change is made). I don’t use WebCT, either, and I’ve never had a student complain about that—especially those where modems never break the 28.8 barrier. And here’s a chance to point out that “Web 2.0″ doesn’t mean “high bandwidth”; while YouTube certainly is, del.icio.us isn’t, and even sites like Flickr which work better with more speed degrade gracefully.
To go back to Alex’s post, limiting our engagement with emerging technologies is the worst way to react to this problem. Quite the contrary: butting up against the speed limits is the way to get them raised, even if it takes a little longer than we want.