The Only Home In Australia With No Internet

Apparently, I was in a minority when I was studying year 12.

The year was 2011, and I still lived at home with my mum. I was doing my HSC – without any internet access (I still have nightmares to this day). We technically lived in ‘the country’, but I refuse to blame my rural city of 30,000 people for my mother’s refusal to sign us up to a service provider.

We had the internet the year before, but we moved house in the first few months of 2011, and mum didn’t feel the need to reconnect it at the new house. It cost too much money, and she was sick of telling me to go to bed when she wandered into the lounge room in the early hours of the morning, while I was still wide awake and scrolling through some website or another.

At the time, 79% of Australian households had an internet connection in 2011, so we were in the minority (ABS 2014). And I hated it.

 

 

But it has been years, and I now have an internet connection to call my own. I recently called my mum to talk to her about her views on the internet. She still doesn’t have it in her home, which means she remains in the minority. Here is what she told me.

1. Television is still a massive spatial component in her home

Because she doesn’t have the internet connected, my mother’s house still revolves around the television. The lounge room in her home has the TV in the centre, and the couch is facing it. There is no dining room, and she has a tray she sits her meals on, while she watches TV and has dinner every night. There is a mattress on the ground directly in front of the TV, which she rests on after dinner, often falling asleep there – in front of the TV.

She doesn’t feel the need to have the internet because she has everything she needs – entertainment wise – with the TV. She isn’t networked in the same way that I am, and she doesn’t understand why people need the internet. But she does need her TV, and she considers it to be the heart of her home.

This reliance on media is summed up in ‘Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces‘, a book by Eric Hirsch,  a professor of media studies, and Roger Silverstone, a social anthropologist and researcher:

“Why do communication and information technologies pose especial problems? One simple answer is, of course, that these technologies are not just objects: they are media. And it is their status as media which distinguishes them relatively, if not absolutely, from other objects such as plants or pictures, and other technologies such as refrigerators or hair dryers or hammers.” (Hirsch & Silverstone 2003, p. 15)

What is being suggested above is that we put more emphasis and worth onto technologies like televisions and the internet because they are media – and therefore interactive. Of course we give more attention to a technology which engages with us in numerous ways and on many different levels.

I’d suggest that my mum has no spatial or emotional connection to the internet, unlike most people in my generation, because she hasn’t been exposed to it, and hasn’t had an opportunity to engage with it.

She hasn’t experienced the internet in this way because…

2. She doesn’t fit the ‘normal’ internet-having demographic

In her article ‘Available in Selected Metros Only: Rural Melancholy and the Promise of Online Connectivity‘, Melissa Gregg explores why people who live in rural areas (like my mother) aren’t the focus of the Australian government’s broadband plan. She notes that:

“the promise of online connectivity is packaged as part of a suburban lifestyle that presumes wealthy (note the number of computers), leisured, nuclear families with stereotypical gender interests.” (Gregg 2010, p. 160).

My mother is not suburban, definitely not wealthy, we were never a nuclear family, and she falls outside of stereotypical gender interests. Gregg continues:

“Telstra’s extensive market research clearly corresponds with publicly accessible studies conducted by government agencies that show the presence of school‐age children is the principal factor in determining household broadband adoption—followed by income, education, occupation and employment… they also build a case for asking why broadband would ever be relevant to older citizens, or the poor or unemployed.” (Gregg 2010, p. 160.)

My mother hasn’t had school aged children in over five years, and she is older (50 plus), and poor. Perhaps these are reasons she doesn’t have, want, or need an internet connection.

While the internet may be changing the home spaces and practices of most families across Australia, my mum and her house are (for the time being) still stuck centred around the television.

REFERENCES:

Australian Bureau of Statistics 2014, Household Use of Information Technology 2012-13, cat. no.8146.0, viewed 10 September 2016, <http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/D0DD505F12749281CA257C89000E3F5E?opendocument>.

Gregg, M 2010,  ‘Available in Selected Metros Only Rural Melancholy and the Promise of Online Connectivity’, Cultural Studies Review, vol 16, no 1, pp. 155 – 169,<https://moodle.uowplatform.edu.au/pluginfile.php/690737/mod_resource/content/1/Gregg%20%282010%29%2C%20selected%20metros%20only.pdf>

Hirsch, E & Silverstone, R 2003, ‘Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces‘, Routledge, 2 September 2003, pp 1-27, <https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=GqSIAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=Consuming+Technologies:+Media+and+Information+in+Domestic+Spaces&ots=8X8_EU1s80&sig=V4BYbjFe0DAbdrrhmT1edbq1hzY&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Consuming%20Technologies%3A%20Media%20and%20Information%20in%20Domestic%20Spaces&f=false>

The Ruined Visit

I do not like going to the cinema anymore. I like watching movies on a massive screen, and the atmosphere is still a positive thing for me, but the people ruin the entire experience.

For example, a few friends and I went to the movies to see “The Visit” when it came out. “The Visit” is a horror film, and one of my friends had been really looking forward to watching it since he found out it was directed by the notorious M. Night Shyamalan. But the movie was ruined by the people in the theatre.

We were sitting two rows in front of a group of teenage girls who had probably been drinking something other than frozen cokes. Throughout the entire movie, they were loud, kicking the seats, talking through the scary parts, texting, and being generally obnoxious. Our group, along with a few other disgruntled cinema-goers did the “be quiet look-back and stare” move, as well as actually  asking them to keep it down or leave the theatre, but they just laughed at us.

Since then, I haven’t enjoyed going to the movies. There is always someone who is loud, or talks through the film, or has crying children. For me, going to the movies is only fulfilling if it allows me to be completely emerged in the experience and any outside distractions take my enjoyment away from me.

The fact that I do not like the theatre but I’m still enjoying the movies is an important distinction to make. Roger Ebert believes that people “love the movies as much as ever. It’s the theaters that are losing their charm,” (Ebert 2011), and I am inclined to agree with him.  The reasons that the viability of cinema theatres is changing in today’s world can be linked back to Torsten Hagerstrand’s theory of the spatial and temporal constraints of human activity.

Hagerstrand found that how humans interact with spaces has limitations, and he identified three constraints with these spaces.

Capability: the limitations on human movement due to physical or biological factors.

Coupling: the need to be in one place at and for a certain time, often interacting with people.

Authority: limitations on access and control by the owners of the space.

(Corbett 2001)

Looking at “The Ruined Visit” cinema experience through these three constraints gives an insight into why the cinema theatre may be becoming a less viable institution in modern times.

Late afternoon and evening sessions are often the busiest movie sessions to go to. With horror movies in general, night-time sessions tend to be the most popular times because of the audiences age and because it also adds to the horror experience. As well as this, movies tend to be more popular and the theatres more populated in the first few sessions of a movie. These are all examples of the capability constraints of the public movie theatre. The movie I went too had just been released and we went to the 7:30pm session, so the theatre was packed.

The sheer amount of people in the theatre meant that there were very little empty seats. If the theatre hadn’t been so full, then we could have moved away from the obnoxious teenagers, but we didn’t have that option. That is the risk you run when attending a movie – it may be busy and full of people, and you can not control the actions of those around you. This is an example of the coupling constraint. Interestingly, the cinema has “rules” where even though you are in a room with people, you do not really interact with them.

These rules are put into place by the cinema authorities, but also dictated through social conventions. Most of the rules in place in theatres aim to maximise the cinema experience for everyone in attendance, such as no talking and no mobile phones. The authorities also dictate the prices of the movie tickets and candy bar foods, and these limitations are an example of the authority constraint. In the case of “The Ruined Visit”, no cinema employees came and removed the teenage girls from the theatre, even though someone went and complained.

The affordability of large home televisions, the ability to pirate movies almost as soon as they are released and the appeal of watching a film without having to adhere to any of the above space constraints are making cinemas less appealing. Unless it is a must-see new release where avoiding spoilers would be impossible, I would much prefer to watch the movie at home, where I could talk if I wanted, not be annoyed by other people, buy food that doesn’t cost a fortune and text if I want to text. I get the impression that many other people feel the same way in 2016.

REFERENCES:

Ebert, R 2011, ‘I’ll tell you why movie revenue is dropping…’, Roger Ebert’s Journal, <http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/ill-tell-you-why-movie-revenue-is-dropping&gt; Accessed 28 August 2016.

Corbett, J 2001, ‘Torsten Hӓgerstrand, Time Geography’, CSISS Classics, Center for Spacially Integrated Social Science, <http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2t75b8sj&gt; accessed 28 August 2016.