Technology gives community new meaning

Remember draggin' main?

For a lot of us, it was a Saturday night summertime tradition, something out of American Graffiti, flirting and fighting the way teens have done since the days of the chariot.

Pity the young person who lived in a town so small there WAS no main street, envious of city cousins with extensive, though overimagined, social lives.

But that's all been changing, first with the invention of the Internet, then the smart phone, making the car an optional component in a young person's journey to adulthood.

Communities linked by electronics don't have to be limited by geography, something rural Nebraska can use to its advantage, participants in the University of Nebraska's Rural Futures Conference learned this week.

"Community is what we seek and embrace," Tom Koulopoulos of the Delphi Group said. "Kids are growing up constantly connected to each other and their devices. These devices become part of their community. The notion of what community is will change in ways that are impossible for us to fathom right now.

"These kids want meaning. They want quality. They want a better life. Kids realize they don't have to live in cities to get it."

Many "kids," actually young adults who have educations and have already started in their careers, are choosing live in rural communities, attracted by the pace of life and healthy environment to raise children.

The cost of living is lower as well, but they must be able to find occupations that pay well enough to support an acceptable standard of living.

The university, of course, plays a role in the effort to attract people to rural Nebraska, through activities such as a UNK project to bring professionals back to create their own opportunities, a UNO program to develop leaders through "crowdlearning" and extension efforts to help rural communities market themselves.

"This is not nostalgia. It's not trying to go back ... it's opportunities with new and innovative ideas," said Palisade native Chuck Schroeder, recently hired as executive director of the Rural Futures Institute.

Schroeder said his own origins in a small town in Southwest Nebraska "didn't confine my view of the world and my access to the world" and that's even truer of life in rural America today.

Schroeder noted that some argued during the last serious crisis in the agricultural economy, in the mid- '80s, that it was time to abandon rural America. "There are still people out there making that argument, that rural communities can't survive, but dang it, they just keep making it."

Kids in those towns don't have to hit mom and dad up for gasoline in order to spend time with their friends; social networks provide much of the interaction formerly facilitated through petroleum products.

Educational Service Units and schools like McCook Community College have long embraced distance learning, a concept with unlimited potential in this day of tablet computers, wifi and broadband access.

Rural business and government must keep up with education's lead, however, and embrace the new meaning of community created by swiftly spreading advances in technology.

Don't believe everything you hear department: A radio caller today reported seeing a local Walmart employee pulling a competitor's grocery ads from a stack of Gazettes at the service counter before putting them out for sale to the public. The newspapers in question are actually not sold, but purchased by the store and used for a regular ad-matching promotion.