Social Networking Before Computers

To wait for a download for one minute is too long, and a three year old Blackberry is old and quaint.

As the EARCOS Jakarta Digital Learning Conference kicked off, delegates representing students from elementary, middle and high school, parents, teachers and educational leaders, met together to discuss the future direction of education and the roles of each in the creation and use of new knowledge and skills. One high school student explained that he loved his Blackberry even though it was ancient, being all of three years old. A grade 5 student lamented that the speed of Indonesian bandwidth made his work and social networking difficult. He explained that to wait for a download for one minute is too long.

I recalled then that up to 1987, I was working at Utopia (22°13'51.48"S 134°33'50.02"E), an Aboriginal Homeland School in the Central Australian desert northeast of Alice Springs. The only connection to the outside world that we had in our silver bullet caravan was the Royal Flying Doctor radio which was continually left on. At the top and bottom of the hour, anyone wanting to make a telephone call had to wait until the operator was ready to accept our call. At that time, voices called from the ether, call-signs like ours Victor Zulu 8 Charlie X-ray Utopia. Somehow the operator made sense of this garbled mess and created a schedule of calls each 3 minutes long and open to the airwaves. If there were many calls, or if there was a medical emergency it was common to bumped to the next or even the one after that half hour schedule. It was not uncommon to wait up to 3 hours to make a three minute public call. At times sunspots would interfere with communication and our calls would be relayed by others who could hear and thus we managed to communicate our needs to others in the outside world.

As inconvenient as this was, we were part of a community of voices. The radio remained on all day, from rising to sleeping. We learned these voices and something of the people behind them. We learned of their lives and their friends. If we were in town and heard a familiar voice across the bar it was like meeting a long time friend. Our community exceeded the size of Europe and we were connected.

The most impressive illustration of this was when I left my 32 week pregnant wife in our caravan as I headed to work. My wife was feeling unwell as I left. At the end of school I returned home to find the van door open and my wife gone. I got on the radio and asked my world, "Does anyone know where Lindy is?" I learned that as I was away at work, her illness became worse, the Flying Doctor flew in picked her up, whisked her away to Alice Springs where the doctors were preparing to remove a ruptured appendix. Everything went fine, but this demonstration of connectivity was almost spiritual.

After a couple of years, Utopia became connected, we had a satellite TV, telephone and fax machine being installed. Well, the excitement was immense - we were to be connected to the world and we didn't care that we were losing the Flying Doctor Radio. But the moment the radio was turned off, I felt immediately isolated.

Our community was gone. Television with its contrived dramas was no substitute. Where once I was mildly frustrated at having to wait 3 hours for a 3 minute open air radphone call, my world now entered complete crisis if the fax paper ran out. I felt I was connected to a large number of people, most of whom I never met. I followed their lives and they followed mine on the airwaves. When the radio was replaced with TV and we joined the world I lost my virtual but none the less real, community.

Listening to the students I realised I had empathy for their networked world. Where I was prepared to wait a long time for a connection, and pined for it when it was gone, our young people have an even more intense relationship with their social network - but waiting a minute is too long!