Xiangyu Tong
CCTP 505 Final Reflective Paper
Cloud: antidote of the rural-urban inequality?
Despite of the significant economic growth and technology development over the past
few decades, it is clear that there are still hundreds of millions of people around the world
struggling in living upon limited resources, mostly in rural areas. The recent worldwide
economic recession would only exacerbate this development gap between rural and urban areas.
Even in the United States, the recognition of unequal access toward resources has raised public
awareness of polarization between the so-called “99 percent” and “1percent”, and has lead to
series of Occupy movements. Access to Internet and other technology is a key aspect of the issue.
Nonetheless, scholars and engineers this time are trying to close the development gap
through technology advancement, by means of facilitating a transformation of internet structure
and function through Cloud computing. They believe that Cloud technology would shift the
paradigm – rural communities would be able to employ technology at a lower cost and less
dependency on infrastructure. For the purpose of reflecting upon the identified problem and
solution, I wish to examine the feasibility of conducting a scholarly research under an
interdisciplinary approach, and to explore how Cloud technology might serve as a means to
engage rural communities to further social and economic development, and to balance the
development gap between the rural and the urban areas.
To evaluate the issue under a bottom-up perspective, as suggested by professor Garcia,
one might ask the following question(s): Which model is more appropriate to accelerate the
implementation process of Cloud to rural communities, bottom-up, top-down or something else?
What is the socioeconomic impact of choosing such model?
In addition, one could also research from a different pair of lens. Drawing from professor
Nelson’s lecture, one might ask the following question(s): How would government policies and
regulation impact people’s perception of technology, namely the idea of Cloud being adopted in
rural areas? How to involve/engage rural community leaders in the decision-making process?
Although both research questions are derived from the same phenomenon, it is
predictable that they may cultivate different assumptions and deviate the according approaches.
On one hand, I’d imagine that scholars like professor Linda Garcia would encourage
giving more attention to the socioeconomic impact of the issue along with an interpretive,
grassroots-level method, such as field studies, interviews, and etc. In this case, one might assume
that Cloud technology holds promises for technology development and promotion in rural areas,
and that both government and big telecommunication corporations could benefit by expanding
either governance or market to rural areas via Cloud service. Furthermore, one might continue to
speculate that the Cloud would enable and empower rural communities by delivering access to
social services in a high-quality-low-cost manner, which is also a great incentive for rural
businesses, medical care providers, and other industries. To iterate, the promotion and
implementation of Cloud seems more of a bidirectional process of both bottom-up and top-down
driven, which could at least reduce the development gap between the two sides if not close it.
The research will also analyze the context and the cultural change during this process.
On the other hand, researchers like professor Michael Nelson would encourage focusing
more on technological and political impact of the issue, along with a post-positivist and
quantitative approach. Essentially, one would research based on the assumption that, to fulfill the
potential of the Cloud it is critical that the regulatory policies are compatibly advancing with this
new technology. This assumption, in addition, would further inspire the consequential thinking
of in what way should the policies being drawn so that it would not put a burden on
technological innovation and advancement. Moreover, one might also assume that it is tricky to
balance the development between the rural and the urban, not only due to economic, political and
social causes, but also due to various historical and ethnographical reasons.
An interdisciplinary approach would clarify and address the issue more thoroughly rather
than taking either one of the two disciplines and their methodologies. While both perspectives
would approach the research problem differently, those deviations are actually interconnected –
they all focus on exploring the relationship between the Cloud technology and its capability to
close the development gap in technology between the rural and urban areas. Taken all
assumptions into account, the findings would provide a more sufficient solution of combining
both quantitative results as data backup and qualitative conclusions a theorized guidance in all
spheres of social, economic, technological, and political concerns.
As a result, it is presumable that under an interdisciplinary approach, one may find out
that the challenge of lack of infrastructure could be solved. Both the “up” and “bottom” could set
policies collaboratively to determine the best alternative. Rural industries would be willing to
facilitate Cloud services due to its pricing and implementation convenience; Governments could
push and adopt policies to secure the promises being made by the cloud; leading
telecommunication companies could also benefit from reducing internal operation cost and
expanding the market. More importantly, an interdisciplinary study could inspire future
researches to improve and guide later development methods to all the perspectives involved.
What is missing in this approach, in my opinion, is the test of time. Is the Cloud the
answer of the technological development gap between the rural and urban areas? We shall wait
and see, but at least, the endeavor to change the world to a better one is all that matters.