Life on the West Island - Instant gratification

Events this week have uncovered severe flaws in the West Island’s current dependence on continuous connectivity via the internet, utilising huge multinational communications companies.

This realisation dawned when the Singapore-owned Optus network crashed for around 12 hours, and much of the nation came to a standstill. Television news bulletins were full of outraged Optus customers, futilely pointing their smartphones to the sky and complaining that they couldn’t buy a skim latte because their favourite coffee shop would only take cash.

Remember cash? Those notes we have used for buying things since they were invented in 7^th Century China? And that’s not to mention coins, which have been in circulation for more than 2,000 years.

Of course, Life on the West Island was unaffected, as we have wallets and purses containing cash money – and anyway, we are Telstra customers. No doubt such an outage would also have had little impact in parts of Polynesia where pigs, woven mats and tapa cloth are stores of value, not to mention the cowrie shell money in parts of Oceania. At the other end of the spectrum, gold remained a valued store of wealth and invisible and maybe fictional cryptocurrencies continued to be traded.

But what of the poor deprived citizens who could not send RUOK text messages to friends or obsess over the specious blogs of “influencers” minute by minute? Their heads were all over our TV sets, wailing that their lives had been ruined, meetings missed, trains cancelled and caffeine addictions left unsated. A wave of disgruntlement resulted in politicians demanding reparations and punishment for those responsible at Optus. Why, our national security and indeed way of life were under severe threat. Public stock were on the verge of being erected in village squares and cells prepared cleared in gaols to house those sentenced to life imprisonment for their heinous crimes.

Why has a simple, short-lived outage by one telecommunications company caused such alarm? Think back to the times when we had power failures lasting days yet somehow survived. Most households had sufficient supplies of food and water to last through such times, and could still communicate within their communities in person, by telephone or by mail. News of local, national and international events came in the daily papers or by wireless, and the populace managed to grasp their significance through detailed reports, not by tweets or unreliable and uncurated social media posts. Life was simpler, but not necessarily less enjoyable. Our parents could tell us to “go and play outside” while making meals or having serious discussions. And we did so safely – unsupervised and making our own fun.

Some years back, we lived and worked in the Pacific for almost five years, much of that time without household electricity or running water – yet managed to raise two bright children, grow our own fruit and vegetables and run a successful business. The life expectancy there was as high as on the West Island, with almost no stress-related conditions such a heart attack or strokes. The internet, of course, was unknown and telecommunications were either landlines or radio telephones. We conducted university tutorials simultaneously in both English and French using satellite connections for students in nine countries, most of whom went on to achieve graduate degrees. Many of those students walked up to 10 km barefoot to the tutorials and studied economics, literature or history, among other subjects.

Our preschool children played daily with a group of around fifteen Polynesian kids aged between four and sixteen, becoming bilingual in the process and learning a great deal about local fruits and vegetables (and even climbing coconut trees). Both now have higher university qualifications and great jobs, so their “deprived” Pacific childhoods without all of today’s mod cons did not seem to put them at a disadvantage in the hectic West Island business world.

It seems that the instant gratification from having a smart phone in your hand at all times has become the most important goal of our society. People wander across busy roads fixated on their screens, crash into fellow pedestrians on footpaths and share loud intimate conversations with other passengers on trains and buses. We don’t seem to mind being tracked day and night by our devices; listened to by Alexa or Google Assistant; spied upon by our smart television or refrigerator; constantly recorded by CCTV; or subjected to facial recognition technology in stores, theatres and airports. Then many people complain about the stresses of modern life, seemingly unaware that they can disconnect or limit their exposure to constant surveillance.

Hence we are seeing demands for compensation from Optus and an official government investigation into the “lost” twelve hours of mega-communication. Outraged social media and pay television pundits are calling for the company to be publicly flogged and hit with billion dollar penalties.

May be it’s time for the West Island to rework Timothy Leary’s 1960s slogan and simply turn off, tune down and drop out? Then we might have time to abandon instant gratification and seek to live less stressful, more fulfilling and enjoyable lives. What do you think, Alexa?