I was brought up in a family of radio hams. Our small suburban house had a 60-foot antenna in the garden and a large console of radio equipment in one of the downstairs living rooms. So while other kids' fathers played golf, mine — and my older brother, too — spent his leisure time chatting about nothing much to fellow hams around the world.
He and my brother weren't quite like Tony Hancock in The Radio Ham, with his famous line: "Friends all over the world. None round here, but friends all over the world." Yet it wasn't that far off the truth. The ham radio world was a sociable one, but you rarely saw who you were being sociable with.
You also tended to know people by their callsign, even those you actually met in the flesh, which was seriously peculiar. Without thinking it eccentric, we would refer to going for a drink with G3BX1 or having dinner with WB2PNP.
Strangest, however, was that all your social chitchat was conducted in public. Anybody could listen in. There was (and I believe still is) a whole breed of people called Short Wave Listeners, whose hobby was, well, listening to people's conversations.
It goes without saying, then, that in ham radio — which, amazingly, is still going strong even in the age of cheap foreign phone calls and Skype video — you would never have a private conversation. A chat would consist of uncontroversial generalities on the subject of one's radio equipment or the weather, each transmission being, in effect, nothing more than a little broadcast monologue. The level of egoism was remarkable.
Now, does all this rather retro geekery by any chance remind you of something that's currently as hip and modern as it's possible to get? Or am I the only one who sees Facebook and Twitter as the new ham radio?
I was reading a tweet from a well-known broadcaster the other day. "Back home from three weeks filming," he wrote. "Taking @jennifersmith254 out for dinner." I'm making up the guy's wife's Twitter name, but I was astonished. That cliquey, technocratic, nerdy reference to his wife by what in ham-speak is her callsign was a throwback to my radio days, complete with the same rampant egoism: as if anyone wants to know he's taking his wife out for dinner.
Social networking is a lot of things, some of them admirable. I appreciate the way it's re-created the kind of villages we all would have lived in 150 years ago. I quite like having minute-by-minute news of everyone I know, from each era of my life, as if we are all living in Lark Rise and gossiping in the street with all sorts of people we've known for decades.
A private method of communication, however, Facebook and Twitter are not. And yet there is a powerful tide of opinion developing this year that email is dead, and that all our communication will soon be conducted on social networking sites.
Jack Dorsey, the 34-year-old chairman and co-founder of Twitter, has said he now uses email only for formal communications and mostly uses instant messaging, which he believes is closer to speech. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, says the same. His COO, Cheryl Sandberg, has said email "is probably going away", adding, "If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today." Only 11 per cent of American teenagers, she explains, now use email.
Of course that's the case. They're kids. Wait until they have jobs and companies to run, or simply need to say something that's important and private.
All our private communications moving to the hard-to-find private areas of public websites, where they can be hacked, mined for marketing information or just accidentally made available for all to see? This, after corporations have spent years ensuring the security of email? After email has become the lifeblood of all business, for dozens of very good reasons I hardly need to spell out?
Sorry, but this is the kind of future thinking that used to predict we would all wear spacesuits, travel in flying cars and eat food capsules. Loath as I am to contradict Dorsey, Zuckerberg et al, I think email dying is as likely as typewriters making a comeback. Maybe I should form a Facebook group for the retention of email.
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