In his TEDx talk, Doug Pitt shows a photo he took in Tanzania, showing African tribesmen who live in grass huts and have just fought off a pride of lions with spears and knives.

If you look closely at the photo, each of these warriors is wearing a cellular phone on his belt.

Infrastructure. In Networked Publics (Varnelis, 2008) the discussion is of specifically communications infrastructure. Pitt’s example highlights how communications network infrastructure is spreading and growing and encompassing the world even faster than such fast-growing and showy types of infrastructure as transportation (railroads, automotive roads, air networks), medical infrastructure, industrial infrastructure, commercial networks, et cetera. I’m sure these warriors have seen a plane or been treated by a doctor or ridden in a Land Rover in their lives–but they own and use phones.

In the “Infrastructure” chapter, Bar et al. do an excellent job of providing a historical and technical background on the growth of the Internet. I am myself an occasional computer journalist, and I have nothing but admiration for this chapter. It’s concise, clear, and non-technical without oversimplifying. I think it makes the case for net neutrality while the authors try to remain neutral themselves. I’d like to extend their speculations about the future some 8 years ago into their actual future: now. I’d also like to consider the implications of the infrastructure for education.

The authors predicted that incumbent broadband providers would oppose net neutrality, and that it might be imposed by government anyway. They were remarkably prescient. They also anticipated the increased speed and lowered cost of modern wireless broadband (“4G”), and again were correct.

On the other hand, their optimism about municipal broadband was not borne out, at least in the USA. Successful lobbying by incumbent providers (“TCNOs”) largely stopped that movement, although there remain a few exceptions. Recently the FCC exercised Federal privilege to allow municipal broadband in states that had previously forbidden it, but Tennessee is suing to retain its right to restrict its own municipalities.

So, how does this affect us educators?

A non-neutral net might be very interesting. What if the University of Phoenix could (effectively) bribe Time Warner and Verizon to carry its video streams faster than ESC’s? More likely and more plausibly, what if YouTube had to pay more to stream video? Could it continue its current free model that subsidizes educational video, something ESC and its sister institutions depend on? Could Second Life or MOOCs continue in a bandwidth-limited world?

Answer: maybe. One hopes we won’t find out–or at least Bar et al. and I hope so.

Reference:
Varnelis, K., & Annenberg Center for Communication (University of Southern California). (2008). Networked publics. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.