E Pluribus, Unum: From 300M to 30K to 3141 to 50 to 1

Thinking about the human condition, I've often pondered that although we're each individual human beings, we don't really exist in isolation. As interesting as the individual human being is (and that is a truly fascinating subject), the truly complex and wonderful aspect of humans is our civilization and our behavior in society. Instead of looking at the individual human, the more natural way to assess our status on the planet might be to look at the number of families, households, neighborhoods, churches, schools, communities, towns, cities, counties, etc. And don't look just at the number of groups, or the diversity of groups, look at how we interact.

The whole field of social networking is fascinating, and it's a growing field.

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes.

This transition is happening so fast. If you're not on at least one of these sites -LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace - you're not included in the on-line society.

It's like not being included in the phone book thirty years ago! Imagine. Reminds me of the scene in the 1979 film The Jerk, where Steve Martin's character Navin Johnson freaks out in ecstasy on getting the new phone book.

The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need! My name in print! That really makes me somebody! Things are going to start happening to me now. and later First I get my name in the phone book and now I'm on your ass. You know, I'll bet more people see that than the phone book. The Jerk Quotes (1979)

The next time you're stuck in a traffic jam, wishing everyone would just go away, longing to be alone, consider this: Human beings owe their big brains, their keen intelligence, and ultimately, their consciousness to the fact that we're social beings, and succeeding in society requires lots of brain power. It's a complex task. That's why we take so long to grow up - there's so much to learn.

And that's why telecommunications is so important. We need to hear each other's voices, we need to share data and compare notes, we need to "reach out and touch someone" constantly. And we need access to information now, not later. All this is why broadband is so important - I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and didn't get my first PC until the late 1980s. I was a late adopter. Working in state government, I had a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe, running PROFS operating system, throughout the 1980s. That was enough for me then.

But now, I can't imagine being without my laptop, my wireless network, and, my Internet connection - my BROADBAND connection. Same goes for my cellphone, although I seemed to do just fine back in the day, making sure I had pocket change before I went out, so I could make a pay phone call if I needed to. That was Then, this is Now. Times change, and we have to adapt, or get left behind.

So, what's my point?

To deny this universal need to connect at the Broadband level is to deny the march of technology and its impact on our lives, and it is to deny the impact and importance of staying in touch with each other.

We can go so far as to say that the nation that is better connected with digital infrastructure will be more competitive in the long run. Don't believe me? Make the counter argument. I'd like to hear it. With high speed connectivity comes a life and an identity on-line. Instant access via the Internet to the world's information, at your fingertips. Don't know the answer, ask our modern Oracles - from Google to Wikipedia, answers are a few keystrokes away in today's world. Need to talk to someone, anyone, anywhere, anytime? Jump on Skype and make the call. If not altogether free, your call will be Damn Cheap. It's truly amazing!

And yet, that's what we do as a society today - We Deny Change - we're busy denying this new reality about the need for universal broadband connectivity. So many seem content to say, "I've got mine, let those others use the library if they need to get on a computer." Huh? "My kids need a PC at home, but let those other kids make do with an hour a day in a computer lab, or they can go to the library if they need to get on a computer." What we are missing by denying this universal need to connect is that our society is less than it could be when it is only partially connected. We all suffer when others are still living in an off-line world, because we don't enjoy the full benefits of an on-line society. We're stuck in In Between Land, a disjointed society that's working like a V-8 engine misfiring on only six cylinders, a truly inefficient place for a society and an economy to be. The longer we stay in this Limbo, the longer it will be until we reach our potential, and the further we will fall behind. Time's a-wastin'.

In our forefather's infinite wisdom, they recognized the powerful (pardon the pun) impact that electricity would have on society and they charted a national policy of electrification, so that all of society could enjoy the benefits of light and power. It took them a while to get there, but they did, and things have never been the same since. Electricity transformed society, ushering in the Modern Era. Same goes for voice telephony. It was national policy that we would would add a fee to each family's phone bill each month, to spread the cost and to promote "Universal Service." It was seen as a national good to tax the many to bring about universal connectivity. Imagine wanting to call someone today, but then realizing they didn't have a phone. We take this level of connectivity for granted, because we had foresight years ago and we took the steps to make it happen.

And yet, with broadband, we still see it as a luxury good, a premium service that people should be willing to pay for if they feel they really need it. And the current cost is quite simply beyond so many in our society. Today's approach simply will not get us to universal broadband connectivity, and we shouldn't expect it to - that's not our policy, and it's not designed to do that. So as a society, we're behind the times when we think that way. Imagine if that had been the way we had approached electricity and telephone service. That's the most charitable way I can put it:

Our current approach to broadband in the US is inadequate to our needs as a modern society.

So when you look down on the US at night time, from up in the sky, what do you see? One amorphous mass of land? Or do you see a diverse set of points of light? How many points of light are on the map? How do we organize ourselves in this country? How we look at our country is one key to beginning to find a solution to our broadband infrastructure problem. We can look at this as a national problem needing a national solution, or we can look at this as a local issue that can be addressed by 30,000 local sets of officials. Or, we can find some combination of the two - why not a national solution AND a myriad of local solutions? What are the existing organizational elements that we can leverage?

Incorporated cities? About 30,000 of them. What if we made an assumption that there are on average 20 neighborhoods in each American city. I have no idea if that's anywhere near correct, but let's just use that as a starting point. that would give us nearly 600,000 communities, where families each share a sense of "this is where I live." All my neighbors beat a path back to this same patch of earth we call Home every night.

How about Counties? There are a little over 3,000 county governments in the United States. The Baby Bears of political subdivisions, these entities are sized "just right" - they're bigger than cities, but smaller than states. They run the gamut from very organized and activist to hardly motivated at all.

The US Postal Service divides the US into Zip Codes, our version of Postal Codes elsewhere. We got organized in order to communicate with the mail. The telecom world subdivides the nation into Area Codes. We got organized in order to communicate with the telephone. Are you connecting the dots? We have websites on the World Wide Web, and we have URLs for web addresses. But we have not yet gotten ourselves organized as a society in order to communicate with Broadband.

What about State solutions? Now it's getting easier, the units larger, they're autonomous, and yet, they're more complex than the more local organizations - there are 50 of them, as many states as there are stars on the American flag.

And yet, in the end, we are one country - a fact we often lose sight of, as many people now feel we are two - there's Us and there's Them. It's like a Dr. Seuss book - Red State, Blue State. We divide ourselves into Conservatives and Liberals, Haves and Have Nots, Rich and Poor, Educated and Uneducated. "And whatever I am, whatever my group is, you suck, your group sucks, and you are wrong." Is this really where we've come to after 231 years? It's like we're a nation of sports teams, all in competition for a limited pot of resources. It's become a Zero Sum game - if you win, that means I lose. This approach does not serve us well - it's short-sighted and in the end, we all lose when the result is that we delay on addressing our infrastructure issues.

Boy, do I get tired of this. The fact is, we have so much more in common as Americans than we are different as Republicans or Democrats, Conservatives or Liberals, or whatever other division you choose to focus on. Despite the divisiveness of the past two decades, we're still one national society, united on several fronts, culturally, linguistically, politically. It's not too late to start acting like a country again. It's not too late to grow up as a society and face reality - we need to start building our nation again, and quit bitching about who is getting more and who is getting less.

So, why all these statistics? If you read this blog on a regular basis, you're aware that I've been musing on a national broadband policy lately. See my last two posts here and here. The beginning of grappling with a solution is in understanding the problem fully, and coming to a consensus on just what the problem is. Until we have a shared view and are speaking the same language, we will not be working together on a common solution that will work for all of us.

Part of what makes America great is its diversity. But with that diversity comes complexity. And our complex society, with a diversity of viewpoints, makes it difficult to come to a consensus on just about anything. Put that together with our sheer size and diversity of geography, and you have a recipe for slow progress, if you get any progress at all.

There are strategies for dealing with complexity. One way is to start by finding some general agreement on principles. If we can do that, we can begin to generate some momentum. Another way to address the complexity is to break the problem into more digestible bits.

That's why I focused this blog on talking about who we are, how we communicate, and different tools we have at our disposal to begin to address our issues. We must start thinking about broadband infrastructure in a different way, because it's vital to our future. And it takes time to build. We are running out of time and we are falling behind. If that's not a crisis, I don't know what one is.