Technology / Society
Australia

Disconnected down under ... being disconnected is unpopular but probably better for humanity!

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Disconnected down under

Hi all, it's Shelly Banjo here. Family vacations can be rough. 'What do you mean there's no Wi-Fi?' bellowed my father when we found out there was no internet at our Airbnb on Sydney's sparkling Bondi Beach.

It was a strange disconnect from the wired enclaves of the U.S. and Hong Kong, where we left from earlier this month. But we were Down Under to relax on the beach, and it's not like we lacked running water. Surely the coffee shop next door would provide a web fix.

It didn't. Oof, it was going to be a long two weeks.

We soon realized Sydney and Melbourne had modern steel buildings and perfectly-brewed Flat Whites but the country's broadband speeds ranked below those of Kenya and Thailand, according to Akamai's State of The Internet Report. Similar trends hold for connectivity and download bandwidth.

Much of Australia's internet troubles stem from historic monopolies and a years-long political fight over a national broadband network that's sucking up tens of billions of dollars of public funds but still lacks connectivity to many homes. That's compounded the challenge of wiring up a sparsely populated continent. Slow-going access has been blamed for contributing to a range of woes ranging from how few Aussie unicorns there are to the meager number of homegrown YouTube stars.

That's not great for a country trying to compete on a global stage. But the disconnect also revealed something pretty amazing on a social level: Even in the most bustling parts of Sydney and Melbourne, I couldn't help but notice people walked down the street with their heads up, rather than burrowed in their devices. They laughed and spoke to one other at restaurants, rather than distractedly flipping through Facebook or WeChat.

At one spot, a pair of smiling boys played quietly with Lego bricks for the entire duration of their parents' meal, letting them enjoy a beer and a burger without having to shove a video game or phone in their kids' faces to keep them quiet.

It felt like an alternate universe to China, where it's not uncommon to see a couple barely speak to one another at a fancy bistro because they're staring at their screens. Or in the U.S., where my friends can barely last a whole conversation without checking their phones.

Maybe the pendulum will swing the other way. Earlier this month, Facebook said it will shift users’ news feeds back toward posts from friends and family and away from businesses and media outlets. Also recently, two big shareholders of Apple, Jana Partners and CALPERs, expressed concerns that the addictive qualities of the iPhone have fostered a public health crisis that could hurt children, urging it to create ways for parents to restrict access and pushing the company to study the effects of heavy usage on mental health.

I'm not one to look down on or get nostalgic around technological advancement, but as the debate forges on around how to address the very real problems of smartphone addiction, it's worth a trip down under to see what we've given up in the name of progress.