Australia Day

Australia Day fell on Saturday, when it was commemorated in many ways and in many places throughout the country. Monday was a public holiday, a second bite of the Australia Day cherry without many of the formalities.

I was at the Test on Saturday (in fact on all five days) and was interested to see that a public citizenship ceremony was conducted during the cricket lunch interval. The MC was Mr Tom Georganas, Federal ALP MP for Hindmarsh; also present were Ms Kate Ellis, Federal Minister for Youth and Sport, and Dr Jane Lomax Smith, State Education Minister. After the singing of the national anthem (for the second time in three days, this time by a young woman who pronounced the first word of the title "Advarnce " which we in SA prefer to the Eastern staters' short a-ed "Advants"), the citizenship ceremony took place.

Then Mr Georganas invited those Australians present (by no means all the crowd, as many were lunching elsewhere) to participate in a "voluntary" re-affirmation of their loyalty to Australia. He explained that doing so would have no legal effect, but I wondered whether this is setting a precedent for future sporting and other events.

In the Fin Review last weekend Mark Latham's piece "Aussie Aussie Aussie - shush, shush, shush" (p 90, not online but summarised here) lamented "the squeezing the fun and irreverence out of the Australian way of life":

A day at the cricket, one of our great national sporting institutions, is indicative of this process. There are now more than 230 security cameras at the SCG targeting large groups of spectators and people in "unusual costumes". Even the security officers have admitted that it resembles a scene from Big Brother. They are relentless in their surveillance, looking for "anyone turning their heads from the game - they are usually guilty of something."

Will it be long before the security cameras begin identifying those who turn their heads away from official ceremonies, or perhaps even don't join in with sufficient gusto? I pondered this as I continued to eat my lunch during the reaffirmation. Most of those around me did likewise but, as Latham and Rex Jory, writing in similar vein in The Advertiser/Adelaide Now on Tuesday, implied, who knows how this might develop? At least I know Don Bradman's average.





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Motor skills

A grab bag of pieces about motoring from the media:

• "Lost in the rush" by motoring journalist Bill Tuckey in The Australian: "Revenue-hungry governments ignore the statistics as they hype the holiday road toll, while their focus on speeding blinds us to the myriad other reasons behind accidents". It skims over a lot of topics but asks some pertinent questions.

• A difference of opinion as to whether the Indian cricket team's bus was involved in a minor accident in Sydney. According to The Australian Radio 2UE reported it as a fact, yet the Indian team media manager said "I am on the bus. We didn't hit anything."
  

• An anti- 4WD rant by Charlotte George in The Age . She uses the fuel guzzling Hummer to condemn all 4WDs (or SUVs as they are increasingly becoming known here) , which is fair enough...up to a point. As a 4WD owner let me say in my defence that I try to restrict my use to medium - long trips, and that I try to drive at the optimum speed for fuel economy (around 90 kph). Doing so makes for long days but with some CDs (audio books or music) to listen to on the open road and stops every two hours or so travelling can be enjoyable.

Perils of the information age

At a weekend barbecue the conversation, while not stopping proceedings, briefly turned to the perils of letting young people succumb to the temptations of the internet and other technology. In today's Australian Alan Gold (perhaps he was at a similar function?) picks up on the topic and asks "where will this computer generation be if they have to figure out things for themselves"?

The omnipresent mobile phone, computer screen, Google, Internet Explorer and all the other gateways to the entirety of human knowledge are all wondrous developments and will be of great benefit to us all, but each is diluting this generation's self-reliance.Why seek the truth yourself, why climb to the top of the mountain to see the view, why spend hours in a musty library, and why speak to somebody person to person when you can do everything with a mobile phone or a search engine on the internet?

He has two children, of whom his daughter is still tolerably well-acquainted with a pre-internet society. His son, however, is a lost cause: when his in-car GPS malfunctions, the perplexed young man, rather than trying to find his own way home, rings his parents for directions.

As a society, we are becoming so reliant on suckling at the breast of the internet that we are in danger of becoming helpless in the face of adversity. In previous generations, the questions whose answers we needed to know often formed a broader inquiry that was satisfied by books. The very nature of a book seduces us into browsing, cross-referencing and flicking through pages in order to find sections or paragraphs. This enables the specific to be widened into the general: unexpected knowledge is gained and inquiry skills are learned. But because of the unearthly power of search engines, today's youth are led straight to the answer instead of contextualising question and answer as part of the richer and wider tapestry of knowledge.

Increasingly this generation is losing the joy of studying books, maps, papers or other non-electronic devices: they are missing the framework of reflection and the joys of browsing and inquiry on which our society has been built. One day they will have to learn the new adage that data isn't information, information isn't knowledge, and knowledge isn't wisdom. Previous generations learned to learn through trial and error, through research, through questions and uncovering the answers. Once, students had to be like Sherlock Holmes, observing and pondering and sifting through the evidence to find the answer; today, students are more selectors than detectors, and download the answers in the absence of clues.

I worry that the instant answers of the internet might lead to some sort of Darwinian devolution of our brains and rob future generations of developing those abilities that raised us above the animals in the first place. Because if we do devolve as a species through the loss of those abilities that helped us find our way out of Africa, how on earth will we navigate our way back?

While IMO Gold overstates his case to make his point he does make me think about the extent to which some (by no means all, at least among those of my acquaintance) people seemed to be hooked, beguiled, besotted or whatever by technology, so that the devices they embrace so avidly become their master. Of course I'm not like that... but I'd be interested in what others think.