Turf highlights a telling footnote in yesterday's Southern Illinoisan article about the recent regional economic summit held at John A. After the obligatory sunshine-and-flowers quotes from participants touting the value of meeting and sharing ideas, visions, plans for growing local economies, the blurb from a pol-ad with the Illinois DCEO: "Many communities are eliminated from competition [for economic development] without even knowing it" because "eighty-five to 90 percent of site selection begins on the internet."
It's hard not to get the impression from the article that our communities are like isolated tribes lead by people who occasionally scuttle out from their house-holds to hold council in uneasy alliance with neighboring groups, but who would prefer to remain safely within the warm glow of their own village fires. And that meanwhile the world outside is flitting back and forth, doing business and living life on streams of electrons, streams that also flow through this region but go unnoticed.
Then I thought I'd check on something. Who, I wondered, owns "southernillinois.com"? Turns out that domain is the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce. "Southernillinois.org"? West Frankfurt. "Southernillinois.net"? Some kind of "illinois alumni directory". Ok, ok, then "southern-illinois.com"? Seems to be someone's personal site. I was running out of variations.
Where is the regional face of Southern Illinois on the web? I couldn't find it in the most logical places. All I found was the smoldering fires of those isolated tribes. And for all their helpfulness with highlighting the importance of a web presence, it can't be with the DCEO. Because the DCEO promotes the governor's "Opportunity Returns" plan, a plan that divides Southern Illinois into several subregions based upon geography.
In making his economic plans, the governor doesn't see "Southern Illinois": he sees individual communities to be arbitrarily divided in whatever way makes the most political sense. We often talk as though Southern Illinois is more than that, more than politics, more than the sum of individual communities. But in Chicago, where many of the electron streams originate, they can't hear this kind of talk. And we aren't putting our own boats into that stream to change their minds.
So if we want our region to exist as something more than jargon for public officials and economic professionals we are better off imagining that the web/broadband/wireless is like the other basic public utilities we depend upon to make our communities go.
And then, instead of occasionally "getting together" to "share ideas" at a regional summit, we will never be apart. Our ideas will flow to each other like a boat always going downstream.
And when that happens we'll be the ones returning opportunity to our Northern neighbors. Even if it hurts their egos a bit to take it.
1 comment:
Is this an advertisement for Shawneenet?
But seriously, your comments are a fair and reasonable corrective to my post. I was looking for an "official" face when I should have perhaps focused more on the no less valuable unofficial, ad hoc, de facto faces that are already out there. Shawneenet is a model for this de facto mentality -- its the kind of service that comes out of the attitude "no one else is doing this. I can do this. I WILL do this. Others will benefit."
As for your concern about integration leading to loss of our uniqueness: I hear you, but I think we can both come together (and embrace technological solutions) AND stay individual. We should, however, recognize that we live in a fundamentally different world than the one that existed before the web. If we truly were regional and presented a relatively united face to this new world we could learn to mitigate some of the problems that come from the unwanted integration that is already being forced upon us.
How much better would it be if we didn't allow those corporations to play communities off on one another and if we could come to a basic shared understanding about the natural resources we most want to protect.
You are right in (at least ) one very important respect. The best that Southern Illinois has to offer IS off the web: its people, its natural beauty, its communities. Technology will never replace these things. But whether we like it or not, there is much being said about us and done to us by people for whom the web is becoming a main source of information and collaboration. We can either continue to ignore this chatter or can provide our own antidote to influence its shape and direction.
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