A community that I value is my hometown of Sterling Massachusetts. I was raised in this town my entire life and left to come up to Maine. Sterling is a small town of just over 5,000 people, and consists mainly of sparce rural homes and farms. The things I value most about Sterling is its community and its dedication to its small town roots.

With my community in mind, I would want to keep the technologies that benefit our small hometown lifestyle.  If I had to support technologies that benefit our community, it would be cellphones and social media. Our town is not very technologically adept, and most of the residents only own a cell phone or a computer. While these products are very easy to detract and pick out the negative aspects of each, I have personally seen how they both benefit our community. Cellphones have allowed our previously isolationist town to connect in ways I never saw in my youth. Our Facebook town page has a few thousand members, and many events are arranged through here. When I was growing up, any events would be advertised via signage or postings. Cellphones allow people across town to instantly communicate and relay messages to each other. While cellphones are not at all new, our town as only recently fully adopted them into part of daily life. I have also seen ways that social media benefits our town, such as Instagram. Our town has many scenic and beautiful locales, and Instagram allows people t share the pictures they take of our vistas. This can help bring in visitors to places like our orchards, lakes, forests and parks. Innovations that help connect people and spread positivity is what makes me proud to be from a small town like Sterling.

If I had to ban or restrict a digital technology from my town, it would be the news. As I mentioned before, our town is very isolated and reserved. If you look at the demographics for sterling, you will find that the population is overwhelmingly white, working class, and below average income. I grew up around rednecks, farmers, and blue collar workers. These people are the heart that drives my small town, but they are rarely, if ever, exposed to any views that challenge their day to day lives. I personally know many families and people back home that get 100% of their current events from the news. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with using the news for its intended purpose, but when it is your only source of any information, many of its underlying biases can show. This does not apply to just one side of the political compass, and many people form their entire political beliefs and identity politics based on which channel they happen to watch every day. Ideally, but unrealistically, my ideal society would receive factual news from an unbiased source. I realize that this is very unreasonable, but I think this would benefit mine, and many other small and isolated towns across the United States.

In all honesty, I don’t think there is any democratic way to decide what technologies to promote and what technologies to ban, at least not at the moment. People do not have the opportunity or the power to decide what technologies they are on the receiving end of. Even if the consumer is not interested in a product, (such as a new amazon or apple product) they will most likely still see it daily whether they want to or not, on TV or the internet. Ideally, people would be able to watch entertainment without the distractions of advertising, but until we are able to ratify that, the consumer will have no choice as to what products should be promoted or banned.