Obama will appoint tech officer to cabinet if elected

Business Week reported on Oct. 19 that, if elected, Barack Obama will likely appoint the first Cabinet-level chief tech­nol­ogy offi­cer because he feels the coun­try “is not doing nearly enough to cre­ate jobs through tech­nol­ogy.” The CTO’s job would be to expand broad­band ser­vice to even more parts of the U.S., espe­cially rural areas into which broad­band doesn’t yet penetrate.

On his blog, Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur, responds to claims that expand­ing broad­band is com­pa­ra­ble to the build­ing of rail­roads in the 1800s. Keen, who is often crit­i­cal of the Web, writes:

[B]roadband pro­vides a very dif­fer­ent kind of trans­porta­tion — one that allows indi­vid­u­als to escape their phys­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties, to cre­ate vir­tual loy­al­ties, to lose their iden­ti­ties in the nar­cis­sis­tic chaos of cyberspace.

I can’t agree wholly with Keen. Surely more broad­band access in rural areas will not kill every­thing local. People will not revert to keyboard-potatoes, wast­ing away in front of their com­puter screens with­out ever vis­it­ing their local stores or pick­ing up the local paper. Besides, the ben­e­fits of greater con­nec­tiv­ity in cur­rently uncon­nected areas — pro­vided peo­ple aren’t just using the Internet for Ebay and celebrity news — will be too great to ignore.

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