WIRED FOR SOUND

Where is the Walkman now?

As a child of the 70s and 80s, I have everlasting memories of Cliff Richard roller skating down the road, Walkman tucked into the belt, singing about being ‘Wired for Sound’. Now, I’m no great musical fan of Sir Cliff, but the song and accompanying video clip was a real cultural touchpoint. It signified being plugged into both the latest in fashion taste and the hottest in technology: ‘Walking about with a head full of music. Cassette in my pocket and I’m gonna use it.’ Try finding something to play that magnetic jumble now!

For me, this song marks a transition point from wireless to wired. At that juncture, being wired now signified high quality tech, the latest and greatest. A generation earlier, we had celebrated the wireless connection of radio, being the latest and greatest…then.

These days, we celebrate our connections via the airwaves again, getting our mental and emotional vaccines through 4G, 5G or Bluetooth. There’s a pattern going on here – we keep swinging between wired and wireless, from tethered to unchained and back again.

Each iteration brings greater aural and technical sophistication. From Morse code to AM in mono, then FM in stereo. CB radio – breaker, breaker good buddy, there’s a Smokey on the loose – and it’s not a bear.

While transitioning: analog became digital, cassettes begat CDs, expensive studios gave way to DAWs on a desktop and then LPs got hip again. The humble carrier pigeon predated human messengers and runners. And then telegraph hooked us up with cabling; town to town, city to city, country to country.

Eventually, this copper conduit enabled telephony and we could dial up anyone we had a number for and chat. Early internet ran down the same wires, allowing us to share memes and then yell at each other in keyboard-protected anonymity. Now we have gone full circle and use our 3-4-5G wirelessly. It might be obfuscated, VPN-ed and encrypted, but this depersonalises the experience. The resultant downsides of this obscurity include misinformation, disinformation, troll farms, and hackers. I wonder how many would trade the speed of instant connectivity for some better data or personal security?

TV also started wirelessly with free-to-air, then moved to wired via cable and Fox. Now, we’ve come the full circle and it’s all streaming – with a mix of both cabled and Wi-Fi or satellite.

Government AV tenders (and particularly with sensitive departments like Defence) usually mandate no wireless communications in design or application. The potential for interception or general flakiness of signal necessitates a connection that can be physically monitored. For jobs like these, wired means quality and security. From this perspective, I’ve always intuitively trusted wired connections that I can see and unplug if I ever get suspicious.

But even the best and most secure of cables are of little use when you are remote. Optical fibre, NBN and the like are all good when you are located in a major urban centre. Wires are abso-bloody-lutely useless when it is too cost prohibitive to run them (i.e. you are physically remote).

My inner Luddite once got joy from watching people walking in circles, raising their device to the sky, seeking just one more bar to connect. This was a double-edged sword when we moved to the bush. Avoiding the boss because I had no signal was a definite upside. Not being able to call for help when disaster strikes – all too common in our great brown land – made me very cognisant of how reliant I am on the interchange of real time communication.

For safety’s sake, I pay a premium to have redundant lines of comms out here amongst the trees and paddocks, lest a fire-breathing Drop Bear sends us into chaos.

Given that our local telephone exchange is out of ports, the corroded copper cable that runs past our back door is of no use. So, we are entirely dependent on cordless tech. Starlink is level one – unlimited downloads at crazy high speeds come tempered with reliance on an increasingly unhinged tech bro – the Space Nazi Elmo. Configuration and user control of their branded routers is somewhat limited.

Entire countries can be disconnected through the whims of a flaky billionaire with little care for anyone downstream of his deluded gamesmanship.

Level two comms come down to Telstra, a company unsure if it is government or private: bloated, inefficient and seemingly uncaring of the impact that their decisions have on their consumers. The decommissioning of 3G networks has left many locals around me unable to connect to the world. To their credit, Telstra recently installed a new tower that covers a major local blackspot. Cynically, it is only a matter of time before some technical failure point takes that tower offline for hours, days or weeks. Past form would suggest that this is inevitable, sooner rather than later.

Rolling radio blackouts occurred here just months ago because of the failure of critical infrastructure equipment, and there were no replacements physically in the state. It took weeks to restore any stability to our phone system here.

When the high tech falls over, we engage level three comms – UHF and VHF radio. Our emergency services use both, but I have been on many firegrounds where only truck-to- truck UHF is of any use. I’ve also experienced complete radio isolation in (potentially) highly dangerous situations. A couple of years ago, I bogged one of our fire trucks in a comms blackspot. Short of using smoke signals (not really kosher in CFA operating procedures!),

I had no connection to the world. I ended up walking 1.5 km down a dirt road to get enough signal to call my brigade to come and rescue me. Fortunately, this was on a training run and I was not surrounded by flames. On another day, this could have ended in calamity. As it was, the only tragedy was personal loss of face as we sheepishly towed the tanker from the mud I had deposited it in. It also took me hours of cleaning and a trip to the District Mechanical Officer to repair the damage caused to the undercarriage of our appliance.

This particular wireless incident was compounded by my own witlessness. I wonder if the CCP monitored this via my Shenzhen-made phone and laughed at my ineptitude. No cassette tapes, roller skates, or leg warmers could help me there.