The high technology of microprocessors, computers, and telecommunications will touch the lives of rural people in countless ways, chiefly as consumer products rather than production items. Microprocessors and microcomputers will help us plan better, inform us, and entertain us, but they will probably affect rural areas less than has the low technology of tractors, fertilizer, and automobiles. Computers will give some rural residents the capability to work at home, corresponding with city offices over telephone lines, and will make some types of policy analysis affordable even for small communities. But computers so far seem to confer no decisive economic advantages to rural areas or cities, nor even to large farms.