Economic and Social Threats to Rural Life
April 4, 2003
Rural life is celebrated for its hospitable people, neighbors that care, labor exchanges, participation in community activities and family life. The bonds that tie rural people together are interwoven with the strands of church, school, community and strong family values.
The hometown quality of rural life depends on one-to-one relationships of trust and dependency formed in many settings as people function in multiple roles.
Disruptive forces. Historically, the automobile and the telephone played a role in changing rural communities and rural social patterns. These technological advances facilitated community contacts, but also provided an avenue for rural people to enlarge their scope of interactions across more distances. As a result, the small towns gave ground to larger trade centers for community and business activity.
Today there are new and more modern technological and economic developments that pose even greater threats to this distinctive rural lifestyle and mutual interdependence.
Television and electronic media. Rural values, community identity and participation are being supplanted by an electronic global village and perspectives from an entertainment oriented mass culture.
Technologies such as television, computer use including the Internet, video games, DVD’s and videocassettes. offer a compelling range of passive entertainment in the home on demand. The need for neighborly social visits is not as great when there is an electronic guest available at our fingertips.
Even if all this programming were superlative, they still have a harmful effect. These choices displace replace family and neighborly activities that shape the values and cement the bonds between people.
The programming itself, by and large, reflects a broad sampling of homogenous pop culture and a low common denominator of values appealing to a mass audience. Then there is the advertising, seductively packaged in upscale wants and high production values to entice us to be consumers of more and more "necessities." Rural children are exposed to materialistic and hedonic values that suggest status and success usually not available in rural communities.
The news programming also orients rural people to national and international issues and concerns, perhaps at the expense of decreasing interest in regional and local issues.
Off-farm employment. With the economic pressure on families in agriculture, off-farm income is seen as a necessary step in maintaining a viable rural lifestyle. Many men and women who out of necessity seek off-farm employment, along with those women who enter the work force for reasons of fulfillment, are no longer available to serve the community. They will find their new social circle and friendships to be increasingly centered through their contacts in the workplace.
There is little time for visits with neighbors and to exchange labor to the extent they were formerly accustomed. Trying to farm, having a family and personal life, and working an off-farm job subtract from the time and energy people have for social contacts and community service.