Clusters of Geek Islands highlight our digital divide

Retirees have joined the home internet bandwagon.

Welcome to Australia 2.0, the ­recently updated version of a ­nation invigorated by a new form of connectivity called the internet, accessed by phone, by cable, by fibre, by whatever.

Our nation, like many others, has fallen in love with the greatest technological ­advance to have reshaped society since, well, since whenever, and that is called the internet. The ­internet is everywhere — or at least we want it to be everywhere.

Ten years ago, barely 70 per cent of the population was sufficiently familiar with the internet to be accessing it from home ­by phone or laptop. A decade and the invention of the iPhone and YouTube later, last year’s census shows 90 per cent of the nation accesses the internet from home.

We are becoming more and more connected, which many of us find intoxicatingly ­seductive — but maybe there is a dark side to all this super-connectivity.

And, no, it’s not the frustration of buffering caused by insufficient capacity (“Can’t wait for the NBN”); it’s the idea that there is now no escape to the old world of disconnection.

In the olden days, say way back in 1993, it was possible to work nine to five, five days a week, whereas today, with the kind of constant connectivity that has been exposed by the census, there is no escape. If your boss sends an email at 9pm on a Friday, that boss will not expect to wait until 9am on Monday to get an answer.

There is no reprieve from “being accessible” 24/7; there are no longer any hidey-holes at the weekend or even on leave when an absence of work-readiness might be excused.

Who doesn’t check their emails, or their social media, after office hours and during the weekend? There are some tech recalcitrants who even check their work emails while on leave. Part of this is driven, I suspect, by an inflated presumption of importance — “that place would fall apart without me” — but it is also a protective strategy: who knows what damage corporate gremlins might wreak while you are away?

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These holiday email-checkers don’t necessarily respond; they’re like trainspotters — they like to sit and watch the email traffic come and go.

In big round numbers, Australia’s perennially online community — can I invent the POCers, who sound like the Fokkers? — defined as those who access the internet at home, has jumped 3.3 million during the past decade. This converts to an average growth rate of 330,000 home email-checkers every year.

This isn’t some sweet social movement spreading to the suburban heartland; this is an invasion — and the downright colonisation — of the home by the internet. There is no escaping the POCers and their movement. We now expect internet access everywhere.

The 10 per cent of the Australian nation that does not partake of the internet-access drug largely comprises the indigenous community in remote parts of the continent or the communities in public housing estates and in the retirement suburbs of big cities and regions.

Oddly, not everyone is an internet acolyte. Internet access has been around for more than 20 years. It’s the speed and the ubiquity of the technology that is changing. And, perhaps not surprisingly, no matter how fast and universal internet access is, it still isn’t enough. We want more ­capacity, greater speed and all-encompassing reach.

In many ways the desire for — I will stop short of saying “lust for” — fast internet ­access is our generation’s socially sanctioned drug.

In the early years — at the 2006 census, for example — home ­internet access was favoured by the young and was in fact ­eschewed by the middle-aged and the elderly.

That changed during the decade to last year: whereas overall access to the internet at home rose by 20 percentage points, the ­increase in the older age groups far surpassed this figure. The baby boomers and older generations have jumped on board the home internet bandwagon.

The oldies’ growing attachment to the internet is being led by 72-year-olds, whose propensity to access the ­internet at home has jumped 40 per cent since 2006. The ­retired population has got itself online probably because of the realisation that this is the best way to connect with grandchildren.

Communities with the greatest attachment to connectivity, among which home access to the internet stretches to 97 per cent, are led by some interesting groups. Yes, Aussies of all age groups access the internet at home. But the most enthusiastic residents, who are seemingly ­always online, are the 4000 followers of the Jain faith from India, 99 per cent of whom use the internet at home.

Also up there on this measure are the more than 400,000 Hindus, also from India, with 96 per cent of them accessing the internet at home. This is probably more a reflection of youth and occupation than it is of religious faith.

At the other end of the spectrum are Australians least likely to connect online at home. In many indigenous communities less than 60 per cent of the population ­accesses the internet at home.

The digital divide in Australia perhaps runs deeper than in many other nations. The most cut-off of our communities are based in the remote interior. Less than 30 per cent of the population in the Tanami Desert, for example, can access the internet at home.

The concept of a digital divide also plays out within our biggest cities. Notwithstanding the fact 72-year-olds have lifted their game in getting online, lower levels of internet access are generally associated with older populations and especially our older ethnic communities of Greek, Italian and Slovenian heritage.

All of this leads to the question of where Australia’s hottest hot spots are in terms of internet access. Which cities, suburbs and towns have the most digitally connected community that will not let go of their mobile phone, tablet or laptop? Which of our Aussie communities are always online?

The answer is clear. The US may have its Silicon Valley but we Australians have gone one better, for we have created Geek ­Islands. Or a Geek ­Island archipelago, to be precise.

There are places, clusters of suburbs, that contain communities likelier to access the internet at home than populations anywhere else on the continent.

Go to Sydney. Go to the north shore and follow the Pacific Highway and the M2 Hills Motorway until you bump into the most comfortably geeky community in Australia. More than 97 per cent of the population accesses the internet at home in ­Kellyville and Rouse Hill in the west and in Wahroonga and St Ives in the east (see map).

But why would these islands of above-the-odds internet-access surface here amid Sydney’s northern suburban wash? The ­answer is simple: because Geek ­Island workers are employed nearby in the Ryde and West Pennant Hills technology cluster.

And yes, many of them are Indian and techie and young and aspirational. Technology jobs cluster in this part of Sydney around the likes of IBM and Oracle and Fujitsu and CSIRO. That is why the most connected people in Australia are based nearby.

In fact, I bet this community is reading this piece in The Australian online right now.

Stop it, residents of the Geek Islands. Put down your phone and connect with the real world.

Alas, I suspect my exhortations to geeks to join me in real time in the real world are falling on deaf ears.

The social and lifestyle shift effected by the advent of the internet has changed the way we live and work within a mere decade. It raises the question of how we may live, work, play and interrelate in another decade.

It’s fun to speculate, but it’s also fun to occasionally put down your phone and engage with the real world.

Bernard Salt is an adjunct professor at Curtin University business school. Research by Simon Kuestenmacher.

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