Although in Australia you could argue that you are legally an ‘adult’ at the age of 18, we still place a huge amount of importance on the 21st birthday celebration. It is a significant ‘coming of age’ event and often celebrated in a traditional Australian way – by drinking too much alcohol!
This week saw a significant 21st birthday that has had an impact on most of us. Just for a moment think back to what was happening 21 years ago. In 1992, Paul Keating was our Prime Minister, John Fahey was our Premier and Tony McGrane was our Mayor. We saw Jim Courier and Monica Seles as the best tennis players of the year and a blonde Victorian cricketer, with obviously no future in the game, made his Test debut and returned figures of 1-150. Shane Warne’s figures improved somewhat with subsequent matches. We listened to Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ (on CD not MP3 player) and we watched ‘A Few Good Men’ at the cinemas. President George H.W. Bush met with President Boris Yeltsin to formally declare the end of the Cold War while Queen Elizabeth II described 1992 as an annus horribilis after various damaging scandals and a fire at Windsor Castle.
In what was a sign of a significant trend, the ten millionth mobile phone was connected in the world. Which brings me to my point (finally I hear you say!)
On 3 December 1992, a Vodafone exec named Richard Jarvis was enjoying hors d’oeuvres at a company party. His ‘mobile’ phone was a 2.1kg Orbitel that measured 216mm by 172mm and was 75mm thick. Not exactly something you slip into your pocket. At a pre-determined time, the display starting flashing. History was made. When Jarvis checked the flashing display, it simply said “Merry Christmas.”
As with many execs, whilst he was sipping champagne, one of the bright young engineers was doing the real work. Neil Papworth composed and sent off the world’s first ever text message.
Initially Richard thought it didn’t work properly because there was no contraction, abbreviation, phonetic substitution, vowel removal or shortening of the message and no emoticons. You could say there were no phontractions (this is my attempt at a neologism – phontraction I define as a word that has been abbreviated with the use of phonetics, contractions and acronyms – sometimes all in the one word – typically to be used in a text message.) On further inspection, Richard realised that it worked perfectly and this was one of the few texts to contain perfect grammar. That first text message, originally designed to be used as a form of one-way pager, has now grown to over 200,000 text messages being sent across the world every second!
Consider another couple of technology changes from a similar timeframe. Mobile phones were introduced in Australia on 23 February 1987 and the first Internet connection occurred in Australia on 24 June 1989. If you assume that most people can’t remember a lot before the age of five, then anyone born after 1983 (anyone that is under the age of 30) has only ever known a world where the Internet and mobile phones existed.
You can therefore almost draw a line in the population. Those currently below 30 have grown up in a different world to those aged 30 and over.
This changing technological world is a huge challenge for Councils. The median age for residents in Dubbo is 35.7 years of age. The overall population is slightly older at 37. When you look at Councillors across NSW, the most common age group is in the 50-59 year bracket with the second most common the 60-69 bracket. Dubbo City Council is younger than the state average with the median age of our Councillors at 51.
If Councils are going to stay in touch with the median age of our residents – and in particular that mobile and Internet connected group below the age of 30 – we are going to have to continue to push ourselves to listen, interact and adapt.
Dubbo City Council is making changes in recognition of the new world we live in. This year, for the first time in its history, the annual report will not be printed and delivered to all residents but rather, available electronically (or on request in paper form). We have launched the usage of ‘Snap, Send, Solve’ to make it easy for residents to use their smartphones to report on issues that need Council attention. We continue to communicate via a variety of social media channels including the Mayoral Facebook page, Twitter account and Mayoral VNews updates on YouTube. One continuing challenge for Councils is that they can’t move all of their focus to the sub-30 age bracket as a Council must try and be relevant to all age brackets so, as much as a Council must embrace new technology, Councils still need to retain traditional communication methods to accommodate all of our community. As a simple example, you can inspect and pay your rates online, but physical rates notices are still posted to all residents. This balancing of being able to accommodate all users introduces additional expenses and complexity but is also necessary to ensure that no residents are left out of the communication and services stream.
Councils don’t always get it right and all Councils welcome feedback on ways to do it better – the problem is that with so many communication channels it can often be hard to decide which method is the best one to use!
10Q 4 reading & I SRSLY look 4WARD 2 the GR8 world of 2MORO. CUL8R!
Clr Mathew Dickerson
Mayor of the City of Dubbo