Broadband makes upstate New York village less rural, says occasional visitor and media reporter

For many rural places in the Northeast, the July 4 holiday is the beginning of second-home season, when folks from the cities decamp to the woods. In many places the city is following them, in the form of high-speed Internet access that makes the Web fully useful but also may change the character of the locales — at least in the view of The New York Times and one of its media reporters, David Carr. He writes from Corinth, N.Y., a town of 6,000 on the narrow, upper Hudson River in the foothills of the Adirondacks:

“My family owns a cabin up the mountain, the kind of place city dwellers come to get off the grid. But the grid keeps finding me. Apart from the Barn [ice-cream stand], there is a good wireless connection at the public library, and if you don’t mind latching onto someone else’s signal, just everywhere else around town. . . . There’s a lot of talk in the gas stations and beauty parlors — some of it on cellphones while waiting in line — about who is scheduled to get hooked up next" to the digital world of flash video and 24/7 news.

“Places like Corinth have never been short on ‘community,’ so the addition of some pages on MySpace, Facebook, or a goofy video on YouTube is not going to knit the place together in some bold new paradigm. The picnic table outside Stewart’s will still be the best place to pick up local gossip. But a broader popular culture that many have rejected by leaving big cities now rides back toward them on a big fat pipe. If you live in Corinth and are jacked in, you could watch the final episode of ‘The Sopranos’ along with the rest of the country and click onto TMZ’s continuing ballad of Lindsay, Paris and Britney, there for the plucking. Indigenous culture is being supplanted by one where everybody is in on the same joke.”

Carr notes that the cable-TV business “has roots in the sticks . . . a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s. Today, the rural hunger for digital service represents a business opportunity for a mature industry that is going to run out of customers at some point.” Time Warner is “headed up the mountain” with its pckage of cable, phone and broadband, “and soon enough, there will be nodes for the likes of me — Mr. Off-the-Grid — to jack in. When that happens, we can take care of business amid the towering pines. But how will that be different from the place we drove three and a half hours to get away from?” (Read more)