Mobile phones Archives - thegoodwills.com

One in three Aussie kids have a mobile phone

aussie-kids-mobile-phones — Image by FunkyFocus from Pixabay

Is there anything more likely to bring on a panic attack than misplacing your mobile phones? It’s around the house somewhere, isn’t it. You tried calling the number but alas, the battery is flat.

Those of you who cannot bear to be parted with your mobile phone might not know that 33% of Australian children between six and 13 own one. Another 14% of Aussie kids have access to a mobile – for example, if they are going out alone, Mum might lend them hers. These numbers were collated in 2020 by the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA).

I texted a mother of three to see what’s allowed in her house. We’ll call her Outraged Mother of Three (OMOT). She replied (on one of her 4.4 devices), that all of her kids (Grades 3-8) have phones.

“The youngest has a phone but it is not hooked up to a Sim or Wi-Fi. It was just the spare and now it’s lost.

“Due to excess use of said phones our children now no longer bring the phones to (our weekend retreat). They also have limitations on when they can use their phones.”

If you didn’t know, most Queensland schools do not allow children to use their mobiles during school hours.

OMOT says the main reason her children have phones is purely to be able to contact her, particularly when school is out.

ACMA’s research shows that children primarily use smart phones for playing games, using apps, watching videos, texting and keeping in touch with family/friends.

OMOT said one outcome of her kids having their own phones is they no longer watch TV, preferring YouTube videos.

“They also find it as a really good way to have group chats. Both of my older kids have group phone messaging with their mates from school.”

The impetus for revisiting mobile use in Australia (apart from changing last week’s distressing subject), was a blog I wrote seven years ago. In that column (May 2014), I recounted losing my mobile while on holiday in New Zealand. It was a new phone on a two-year contract, so losing it was a bit of a disaster.

The good news was that a Kiwi out jogging found it lying in the long grass outside my nephew’s house. His enterprising wife looked up the call log and dialled my wife’s mobile (as we were filling up the hire car and looking at travel insurance options). A 20 km detour later I was reunited with my then new android phone.

In 2021, after relying on them during Covid, Australians (and their children), are increasingly bound to their devices. They use them for a wide range of business, personal and entertainment communications. They send and receive emails, send and receive texts, check the odds on the footie, do internet banking and watch videos. They might check in on Facebook and interact with ‘friends’, send PM’s (private messages) to their close friends and maybe watch a music video or two. Very occasionally, they might ring someone up and have a convo (conversation).

The technology is amazing: really, it is. Thirty years ago when you were in a community choir, the choir director handed out printed scores on rehearsal night. The director would have ordered them from a music publisher and then waited weeks until they arrived in the letterbox. Now we can find and download scores (on our phones, even), print them out, and also find (free) audio rehearsal files.

The irony is that few people use the full capabilities of a smart device. I was chatting to a doctor at a barbecue when a helicopter flew overhead.

“That’ll be the rescue helicopter,” she said. She showed me an app on her phone which verified that it was indeed the rescue helicopter. The app showed where it had come from and where it was going (and when it would arrive). That’s no ordinary app, I’ll grant you, but it shows what is possible. In the days when we could travel the world, language apps were all the go. Just wave the phone at the waitress in Tokyo (who would hear a Siri-type voice intoning Shīfūdo ni arerugī ga arimasu (I’m allergic to seafood).

In 2014, when I wrote Hold the Phones, there were 11.9 million smart phones in Australia. Deloitte’s Mobile Nation report showed there were 17.9 million in circulation in 2019. It’s not just smart phones – the average internet user has 4.4 devices they use to interact with the net. The most popular devices were smart TVs, wearable devices and voice-controlled smart speakers.

See how you go with this list (5/8 for me).

Australians spend three hours a day using their smartphones;
94% take their phones with them when leaving the house;
Almost 25% watch live TV on their phones at least once a week;
23% stream film/TV series weekly;
48% check their mobile phones at least once every 30 minutes;
71% feel safer when they have their phone with them;
Just over 90% took at least one active step in on-linesecurity
53% worry about over-reliance/addiction to their devices;

The results of a survey commissioned by ACMA showed that “nearly all Australians” (99%) accessed the internet in the previous six months in 2020 (up from 90% in 2019). I assume this includes the approx 1.7 million or so kids aged 6 to 13.

Nevertheless, the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 2.9 million Australians were not on-line because of affordability, location or lack of digital literacy. Who knows how those people struggled last year.

ACMA’s survey (by Roy Morgan) found that Covid lock downs contributed to a significant increase in Internet-based activities. The use of communications apps soared, with 72% of Australian adults using one (up from 63% in 2019). Facebook Messenger was the most popular app (66%), followed by Zoom (43%).

There has been exponential growth in mobile data consumption – 9MB a month in 2018, according to the ABS, but growing at 40% a year.

So yes, the person opposite you staring at a screen on the commuter train is probably catching up on Mare of Easttown. This would account for the lack of eye contact and casual conversation and the panic when she realises she has gone past her stop.

It’s all very well to learn that children are already tech-savvy, but we need to find better ways to connect older Australians to the digital world. A report by the eSafety Commissioner found that 8% of Australia’s 8 million people aged 50 and over are “digitally disengaged”. This means that 640,000 older Australians (74% of them over 70), do not use the internet at all. Moreover, 6% of this target group showed no interest at all in improving “digital literacy”.

(By contrast, my 94 year old Godfather began using an Ipad long before I did. Ed)

As this research found, family and friends can play an important part in helping older Australians learn some digital tricks.

It seems like a no-brainer – get those digital-savvy kids to give Oma and Opa a few lessons – after they’ve done their homework, of course.

FOMM Back Pages:

Last week: I’m still not holding my breath.

Asylum seekers and the seven-year itch

asylum-seekers-seven-years — Asylum seekers and refugee rally – photo by John Englart flickr.com

If Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton ever had a lapse in judgement, it would be thinking that asylum seekers and their supporters have given up. Over a seven-year span, Mr Dutton and his predecessors have exposed asylum seekers to a punitive system (which is outside the UN Convention on Refugees).

As you may hear this weekend, Sunday marks seven years of detention for those who were sent to centres on Manus Island and Nauru. At the time, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that people arriving by boat to seek asylum would be processed offshore and never be allowed to resettle in Australia. #7yearstoolong

Four administrations later (Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison), the unconscionable treatment of people seeking refuge from persecution, torture and ethnic cleansing in their homelands has barely changed.

The now-famous author Behrooz Bouchani chronicled his torturous life on Manus Island in the award-winning book, ‘No friend but the Mountain’. in 2019, Australians became more aware of the effects of despair and mental health issues suffered by asylum seekers in our offshore detention centres. There was a seemingly effective campaign to Get the Kids Off Nauru. All the while, the Australian government continued to be responsible for those much-criticised centres (outsourcing the task to private security firms). Along the way, the government re-opened, closed and then re-opened again the Christmas Island detention centre, Christmas Island being an Australian protectorate.

During the past seven years, the numbers of people who have started or joined an existing asylum seeker support group have grown, to include such organisations as Rural Australians for Refugees.

This national movement started with a campaign by the good folk of Biloela, who took in a Sri Lankan family. You’d know about this saga, where authorities came in the early hours and removed the couple and their two children, taking them into detention. Over time, the family of four ended up being the only detainees in the Christmas Island Detention Centre, at a reported cost to the taxpayer of $27 million a year.

Closer to home, a Kangaroo Point motel has become the focus of the protest movement which wants to see an end to our egregious treatment of people whose only possible mistake was to pay a people smuggler to bring them to Australia – irregular, but not illegal.

Asylum seeker supporters fought long and hard to challenge the government to bring unwell detainees from offshore detention centres. This resulted in a new Act which forced the government’s hand. Even though people needing medical attention were brought to Australia, it seems that few of those brought here under the Medevac Bill have been released from detention. A lot of those people ended up at a motel in the Brisbane inner city suburb of Kangaroo Point.

As Hannah Ryan wrote in The Guardian last month , the Australian government engaged private guards and assigned them to the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel & Apartments, describing it as an “alternative place of detention”. Here, 120 people who had been detained on Manus Island or Nauru and were sent to Australia for medical treatment, are being kept indefinitely. They are not allowed to leave, as Ryan says “not even to visit the KFC across the road”.

Since COVID-19 raised its head in March, they are not allowed visitors either. Over the year or so this has been going on, some detainees took to holding up placards from the motel balconies, when allowed out for fresh air. Support networks got wind of this and a series of rallies began, not without some risks. At a rally on June 29, 40 protesters were arrested for staging a sit-in after the two-hour permit had expired.

Public protests aside, Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton is pressing on with a draft Act designed to crack down on drug dealing and the development of terrorist cells. The draft Act would make it illegal for people in detention to have a mobile phone.

Just think about that for a minute, while realising how crucial your mobile phone has been to you through the COVID-19 lockdown.

Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow made a submission to a Parliamentary committee, saying that the bill should not proceed. Writing in the Canberra Times, Santow said:

“The Commission recommends that risks be considered on a case-by-case basis. If a particular person in detention has used their phone to commit illegal activity or endanger the security of Australia, this would be a reason to prohibit them from having a phone. But it would not justify a ban that applies to other people who haven’t been shown to be a risk.”

The government said when introducing this Bill that it did not plan to introduce a blanket ban on mobile phones, rather to address risks to health, safety, and security.

Those protesting on Sunday have made it clear what they want – an end to indefinite detention. As stated in Green Left Weekly (where you will find a list of rallies and gatherings and their locations): “Free the refugees and bring those still on Manus Island and Nauru to Australia now.”

The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences have pushed this issue onto the media back-burner. The recent closure of some media outlets and the migration of others to online only has further diluted the message.

So emerged the hashtag #7yearstoolong on social media as volunteer groups try to raise awareness of institutionalised inaction.

While the government continues to take a hard line stance, a survey last year showed that attitudes towards refugees are hardening. Part of a global study on attitudes, it shows that 44% of Australians think borders should be closed, up 5% on the 2017 survey.

Globally, 54% of people doubted whether refugees coming into their country were really genuine and not arriving just for economic reasons. Australians’ doubts about people’s motives rated lower, at 49%. About 42% of Australians agree that refugees successfully integrate (a drop of three points since 2017).

Refugee Council of Australia statistics show that at March 31, 2020, there were 1,373 people held in onshore detention centres. Apart from any other consideration, it is costing Australia an estimated $137.34 million a year to keep refugees in domestic detention, based on figures provided by the Kaldor Centre.

And, did you know that 64,000 foreigners have overstayed their Australian work or tourist visas, with up to 12,000 believed to have been here for 20 years or more?

All of the above, I contend, should be seen in the context of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s plan to allow Hong Kong Chinese safe haven in Australia. (Ed: “Probably because they would be well off financially”

Oh, that’s right, we are still in thrall of the ultimate strong leader (John Howard), who said in 2001 his government had an irrevocable view on border protection: “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

Every leader from Kevin Rudd onwards has toed the same Sovereign Borders line. If you are expecting anything different from the Leader of the Opposition, should he ever win an election, do not hold your breath.

Further reading: This Australian Government policy paper sets out the facts and dispels myths about asylum seekers and refugees.

We are travelling in remote western Queensland, so expect one from the archives next Friday.

*Tom Hanks’ companion in Castaway was a volleyball, not a football as I wrote last week (and the Hug Patrol photo was from 2012, not 2019).

Not everyone has Internet access

I visited my local library last week for the first time in months and noticed that public internet access (computers, desks and chairs), had been removed. Desks, tables and chairs had also been removed from the reading room, where one could sit for hours browsing newspapers and magazines or working on jigsaw puzzles.

“That’s not very fair on people who don’t have a computer or access to WIFI,” said She Who Believes in Equality.

A survey published in March this year, citing Australian Bureau of Statistics data, showed that 2.5 million Australians are not online. Reasons given by respondents included affordability issues, location (poor signal or no signal), or that they lacked the 21^st century skill called ‘digital literacy’.

The Centre for Social Inclusion (CSI) produces the National Digital inclusion Index, based on data from Roy Morgan Research.

Since data was first collected in 2014, Australia’s overall digital inclusion score has risen by 7.9 points, from 54.0 to 61.9. Improvements have been evident across all three categories: Access, Affordability and Digital Ability. CSI notes in its 2019 report that those with the lowest ADII score are in the lowest socio-economic demographic (income under $35,000), with a score of 43.3 points. The Northern Territory is excluded from the research (sample too small), but indigenous Australians living elsewhere scored 55.1.

The digital divide is an obvious social strata marker, with a 30.5 point difference between the lowest income demographic (43.3) and the highest (73.8).

The 2019 survey shows that all segments of the digital access market improved on their 2018 score. Scores are allocated to particular geographic regions and socio-demographic groups, over a six-year period from 2014 to 2019. People aged 65 and over are the least digitally included age group, with a score of 48 (13.9 points below the national average).

I know a few elders who, for one reason or another, refuse to engage with the digital world, clinging on to old analogue TV sets and VCRs, eschewing mobile phones and in some cases, not even having an answering machine. The NBN is relentlessly catching up with this cohort. Moreover, financial institutions are forcing these older customers to abandon time-honoured way of paying bills (by cheque and in person).

As an aside, when I first tried to source the CSI report, I was ironically greeted with the message, “bandwidth exceeded, try later”.

We’re all getting a lot of messages like that with the weight of people using Facebook, Twitter and their affiliates 24/7, not to mention streaming movies, TV series and engaging in bandwidth-using virtual performances and community catch ups.

Last time I wrote about this subject, 90,000 Australians were still using dial-up modems to surf the Internet. That annoying yet welcoming modem squeal is heard no longer, at least not by Telstra customers. Telstra retired its dial-up service In December 2015, citing a sharp drop off in the numbers of people still using dial-up in favour of a variety of connectivity options.

When I last worked for the now mostly digital regional news services, when we went to public meetings in rural areas, we’d take a portable modem. The mid-1980s version was a device you clamped to the handset of a (dial up) phone and then transmitted your news report from the laptop. News organisations spent a fortune equipping field reporters with clunky laptops which weighed at least 10kg and cost thousands. When the technology inevitably did not work, reporters simply called a ‘copy-taker’ at HQ and dictated the story.

Copy-takers are long gone, and the rest of the old school cohort who had not already taken a redundancy package will most likely be swept out the door in the latest media shakeout.

But getting back to the 2.5 million Australians who told survey takers they do not have access to the Internet.

A group of 30 community organisations has called for urgent efforts to help Australians not connected to the internet. The group told the Sydney Morning Herald that the pre-existing problem was heightened during the pandemic, hindering access to government services; for example, children trying to undertake online education and people needing access to telehealth services.

The group asked Communications Minister Paul Fletcher to consider ‘targeted low-cost broadband’ connections for eligible households, a relief package of basic telecommunications equipment and a telephone service for people with low digital literacy.

Of those Australians who do have Internet access, more than four million use mobile only to ‘gain access to the internet’ (note how I refuse to verb a noun). This means they have a mobile phone or mobile broadband device with a data allowance, but no fixed connection. This cohort rated a low ADII score of 43.7, some 18.2 points below the national average (61.9). Mobile data costs substantially more per gigabyte than fixed broadband, which means mobile-only users are unlikely to be binge-watching Narcos, House of Cards or Killing Eve.

Mobile-only use is linked with socio-economic factors, with up to a third of people in low-income households, those with low levels of education and the unemployed more likely to be using mobile-only.

Now here’s what at first sight seems to be an anomaly. You would know the oft-quoted homeless numbers in Australia – around 116,000 at the last Census. However, as the survey found, homeless people find phones essential for survival and safety, job prospects and for moving out of homelessness.

Consumer advocate The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN), cited a Sydney University study that found 92% of Australians who identify as homeless (95% in Sydney and Melbourne), own a mobile phone. The homeless favour smart phones (77% of those surveyed had a pre-paid plan for a smart phone). They typically use free WIFI and public access (libraries) to keep costs down.

You might well ask, “How can a homeless person afford a smart phone?”

Well, I bought one last week for $29! It is destined to replace an unreliable IPod as a portable music player. But it also has all of the apps anyone needing a survival tool could ever use. And you can use it to call someone or send a text!

Apps take up most of the memory in this bargain phone. But even so, a minimum $10 a month would make this a handy ‘Where am I sleeping tonight?’ tool.

The annual Deloitte Australia Mobile Use Survey’s key finding is that mobile penetration in Australia has maxed out at 91% (about 20 million users), and accordingly, sales are slowing. The main reason for this is that Australians are holding on to their phones longer (three years on average).

If you are at all interested in how mobile technology is developing, this report (you need to sign up to download it), is illuminating.

For example, did you know that mobile is starting to lose ground to voice-assisted speakers (a 51% increase since 2018), as the preferred user method of ‘gaining access to’ home services and entertainment?

(“OK, Google, play ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen” – but you have to train the thing to recognise your accent…Ed)

As an observation on the recent move by News Ltd to shut down many print titles and move most of the survivors online, mobile remains our preferred device to consume news. Having said that, Australians are less interested in tuning in at all, with only 39% reading the news weekly, compared to 48% last year.

And, as if we did not already know, 27% of Australia’s 17.9 million smart phone owners use their device at least once a week to watch a TV series or movies, up from just 5% in 2015! I relate to this statistic, as I covertly watch Killing Eve on my smart phone, as She Who Believes in Equality chooses not to watch.

Bandwidth exceeded – try later.

FOMM back pages: https://bobwords.com.au/friday-on-my-mind/ Hold the phones 2014