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Nearly every discussion about Georgia’s economic future begins at the top, with high-tech companies like Digirad, the medical imaging firm which recently announced it’s relocating its headquarters to Atlanta, or prime industrial plums like the KIA plant in West Point.

But a provocative report by a new group, the Essential Economy Council, argues that the upper tiers of the state’s economy rest on a cluster of low-end economic sectors, not connected to each other in earlier studies, which face severe challenges in the years ahead.

“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan wrote five decades ago. There could be no better proof of the lasting relevance of that observation than the way I watched the debate on Georgia’s municipal broadband bill last Thursday night.

I’ve spent countless hours watching legislative debates on the hall monitors at this capitol and others across the South, and countless more watching archived footage on my desktop. But when I picked up a hand-me-down, first-generation iPad to watch this debate at home, it had the force of a revelation. The clarity of the live-streamed images on that device was so much better than what I was accustomed to, that when Rep. Don Parsons of Marietta began calling out by name the legislators who’d spoken against the measure, you could see that his hands were trembling, ever so slightly.