Inequalities in the Information Age: Farmers' Differential Adoption and Use of Four Information Technologies Eric A. Abbott and J. Paul Yarbrough Eric A. Abbott is a professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and Chair of the Technology and Social Change Program at Iowa State University. J. Paul Yarbrough is a professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. They have worked cooperatively in studying the impact of new communication technologies on farmers in New York and Iowa. Yarbrough recently completed a report on information technology and rural economic development for the Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress, as part of its project on Information Age Technology and Rural Economic Development. Abbott has studied impacts of radio and other communication technologies in developing countries as well as Iowa. Research in Iowa has been sponsored by Iowa State Agricultural Experiment Station Projects 2514 and 2725. In New York, the surveys were undertaken as part of Corneli Experiment Station Projects 131410 and 131404. ABSTRACT New communication technologies such as the microcomputer, videotex/teletext systems, the videocassette recorder, and satellite receiving dishes have been available to farmers since the early 1980s. This longitudinal study examines ethic~l issues associated with the impact that differential patterns of adoption and use of these technologies have had on inequalities amongfarmers from 1982 to 1989. The results demonstrdte a strong adoption and use bias toward larger scale farmers who already have well-developed skills for handling information. This bias is especially strong for microcomputer and videotexlteletext systems, and it is increasing over time. Although the same farmers are not adopting all communication innovations, there is a strong tendency toward the already information-rich making the most use o.f the innovations they adopt. The article concludes with several recommendations that would help minimize some of these information inequalities. We are in the middle of what some futurists have termed a "'New Information Age," a time when the computer and other new communication technologies will revolutionize society. Daniel Bell (1973) with his Post-Industrial Society, Marc Porat (1977) with The Information Society, Anthony Smith (1980) and others date the arrival of this new age at about 1960. It was characterized by the movement of ever-increasing num- bers of workers into information jobs, and the use of the computer and other technologies to handle the increasing demand for data creation, storage, and movement. It was expected that the information age would affect every sector of society. In agriculture, it has been proclaimed amid blue sky predictions of a computer on every farm that would handle farm records, help make key deci- sions, and even turn the coffee pot on in the morning (Kramer, 1981; Vincent, 1987). Instantaneous connec- tions with the world would overcome the barrier of distance and make farmers and rural residents more competitive (Dillman, 1985,1989; Hudson, 1984; Rogers and Case, 1984). These predictions need to be tempered in at least two ways. First, the information age has been going on for some time. It has been characterized by the growth of knowledge bases to serve needs spawned by the struc- tural changes of the Industrial Revolution. Mass circula- tion newspapers emerged only when a societal need for the information they provided was coupled with new technologies for their production (Schudson, 1978), and their impacts were certainly as revolutionary as many we have seen since 1960. The diffusion of the telegraph and telephone transformed the limitations of time and dis- tance, surely with as much impact as their more recent electronic counterparts -- radio and TV. Computers, videotex/teletext systems, videocassette recorders, and satellite receiving dishes are simply the newest innova- 67