Aaron Brown is a writer, radio guy and teacher living on the Iron Range. Back in the day, he was a loud voice asking for better broadband. He got it a few years ago, but is noting in a recent column that “rural broadband isn’t closing gaps; it’s widening them.” He talks about his days of advocacy…

Along the way I advocated for the economic benefits of rural high-speed internet. I think my earliest writing supporting rural high speed internet came about 20 years ago. I’ve written more than 100 columns, essays and blog posts on the topic.

The logic of my cause went like this. The Silicon Valley boom of the early 2000s eliminated industrial jobs in places like the Iron Range, but created new jobs in tech and creative services. Those jobs would be closed off to rural and Rust Belt people if they could not access affordable, reliable high speed internet in their communities.

And his thoughts today…

In 2016, I attended a community meeting in my home township to celebrate the coming expansion of high-speed internet to our area. At the time, I was managing the campaign of a friend of mine, DFL Rep. Tom Anzelc. He helped get the grant funding that made the expansion possible. As we looked out over the sea of excited people, we felt certain that this would be a winning campaign issue.

It wasn’t. My friend lost badly in the Trump wave that washed over rural Minnesota that year. We lost our township, and probably most of the votes at that community meeting a month earlier. As the internet got better and faster, it became possible to share more sophisticated YouTube videos and targeted advertising to local voters, who for the first time ever saw more than $100,000 in negative outside spending on a state House race.

Last year’s Democratic Congress and this year’s DFL-controlled Minnesota Legislature delivered historic spending for rural high speed internet. Though some doubt that Minnesota will achieve universal broadband immediately, the fact that it might be possible reflects the culmination of a long battle for equality between rural and urban Minnesota. But rural voters will not reward Democrats for this. In fact, rural voters dislike Democrats more than ever.

Perhaps that is because the economic adaptability made possible by universal broadband is no closer to reality. Rural people displaced by the changing economy don’t want to code software or write snarky articles for websites named Boink or Glurg. They want to work the jobs their parents had, and to preserve a world they once understood, even if it wasn’t particularly rosy.

It’s thoughtful piece, more nuanced than I can capture in snippets. But in my world, this highlights the need for information literacy as part of digital equity. In library school, I learned to do bibliographic instruction. This means I taught classes on how to assess information, how to tell if it’s likely to be true or biased, outdated or unfounded. I taught attendees how to look for authors and sponsoring publishers, dated published and/or updated. We sometimes even went into reviews of information sources or looking at who cites the work in their work. These days I might even go into who owns the domain name.

It takes work and it’s trickier to do now than it used to be. We might not all agree on who is a credible author or unbiased sponsor but learning how to look at the “meta-tags” of the information we consume is a skill worth building or promoting, like being able to read a nutrition label.