32 min listen
Rural broadband and the politics of "good enough"
FromDemocracy Works
ratings:
Length:
44 minutes
Released:
Sep 12, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
COVID-19 showed just how essential high-speed Internet is to our everyday lives. It determines how many of us work, learn, and access news and entertainment. Yet, millions of Americans do not have reliable access to broadband and millions more can't afford to pay for the service that's available to them.Christopher Ali, the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State, unpacks these issues in his book Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity and joins us this week for a discussion about market failures, how communities across the country are democratizing Internet access and how the federal government is now starting to step in thanks to funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in November 2021.We also discuss some of Ali's more recent work on the relationship between broadband deserts and news deserts, and how the combination impacts democratic citizenship.Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural ConnectivityChristopher Ali on Twitter
Released:
Sep 12, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
How Democracies Die author Daniel Ziblatt on the ‘grinding work’ of democracy: Daniel Ziblatt has done a lot of interviews since the release of How Democracies Die, the bestselling book he co-wrote with Steven Levitsky. But we asked him a question he’d never gotten before — about a line toward the end of the book when he refers to democracy as “grinding work.” by Democracy Works