Nashville Beats Memphis Ag-- Oh, You Know the Drill

Intel has released its annual report of the most wired cities and, no surprise, Memphis does poorly. We're America's 17th largest metropolis but we rank 68 in wireless access. Nashville shows up at 27 and Knoxville is 52. St. Louis is 35. Hell's bells, Little Rock is ahead of us at 59!

This does not surprise me. Too much of Memphis is too poor to take advantage of portable computing technology, unable to afford the laptops, and too out-of-step with the digital revolution to know or care much anyway.

But it saddens me nonetheless. Being digitally up-to-date isn't incompatible with the small-town feel Memphis wants to hold on to. It actually reinforces it by keeping people in this spread-out burg more in touch than would otherwise be possible.

But as long as we have the nation's second-highest unemployment rate, crappy warehouse jobs on offer, a city government that won't get behind the infrastructure needed, and a school system that turns out people too ignorant to operate a wireless computer, I guess we'll just have to suffer.