Going Digital
- Details
- Written August 2020
Things have come a long way since I toddled up to the local radio repair shop 70-odd years ago. I’d wound the copper wire round an empty cardboard container of Vim, where I could scratch a piece of wire along a sandpapered section. All I needed was a crystal and an aerial to connect to an SABC broadcast of world news. And before long I took a step up with a one-valve set. I’d proudly soldered the wires together and connected it to the mains. It didn’t work. I was back at the friendly man in the radio-repair shop. ‘Try shortening all these wires,’ he told me. ‘Remember it’s not called a wireless for nothing!’ That did the trick. No special box, just the metal base, a tuner, a set of headphones and I had a couple of radio stations at my fingertips.
The older phones had a round dial. Some of those phone numbers are still embedded in the memory. Cape Town 69827; 62038, for instance. But for the intercom you just dialled a single number. We had them set up for the hospital at Chikankata. Sadly one after the other had been damaged by lightning strikes, so business manager, Les Pull, used to rush round during a storm, disconnecting the phones. He didn’t seem to mind. I wonder if he thought about being struck himself. He'd be interested in the Chikankata of today with a couple of masts gracing the skyline. The mobile phone is part of modern Zambia.
For those 12 years in Zambia we had a party line, several subscribers connected. It was a little annoying as the phone would ring. Two shorts and two long would be for us, but a neighbouring farmer two shorts and three long. We could have listened in to their conversations. I did wonder whether others might have been eaves-dropping on ours. Was I communicating with ‘the enemy’ south of the border?
One of my most memorable phone conversations was getting a call from South Africa. It was my father on the line. Margaret had been in bed for weeks with a slipped disc - that was the prescribed treatment in those days. He wanted to know how we were getting on. I could hear him, and his near exasperation as he couldn’t hear me. The call ended up with the operator relaying messages sentence by sentence, rather like a translator.
So was I communicating with ‘the enemy? When the house and office were searched it was the dictaphone that was confiscated. This must be a two-way radio. Little did they know my ever-polite secretaries preferred to hear my voice rather than see my scribbled handwriting which had deteriorated over the years. But when I arrived in London, I was told by one of them: ‘With those headphones I feel like one of the three monkeys who speak, see and hear no evil.’ So we resorted to shorthand dictation, and then someone found that my handwriting improved with a pencil, so we went back to square one.
I struggled to find a dictaphone in India, but pencils were in plentiful supply. But it was there I was introduced to the computer. I remember being in conversation with a supervising visitor from London and my discomfort being on the other side of a laptop. There was a feeling of alienation. It seemed out of place in a setting where our office had a plug-in switchboard and where we sometimes had to rely on telegrams and messengers to communicate.
Perhaps this was the reason why I was slow to adapt to the cyber world. But Steve, our electronically expert son-in-law, gently weaned us off a Commodore 68 and introduced us to the world of computers. A visit to Johannesburg and he spent time upgrading ours. I was starting to become my own secretary. Gone the dictaphone and the pencil. And with grandson, David, following in his father’s footsteps, able to write computer language, he soon had us setting up a personal website.
I was by now fully persuaded of the value of the internet. So that when 9/11 forced cancellation of a major international conference we’d been planning for Bangladesh, we resorted to it becoming a virtual conference. And that was in the days before Skype and Zoom which have come to the forefront of communication during coronavirus days. Now teleconferences and webinars are common place. But its time had not yet come when I pressed The Salvation Army to fulfil William Booth’s dream of a University of Humanity by launching this internationally on the internet.
The health service was becoming increasingly digital when I returned to the bedside in palliative care nearly 20 years ago. But not quite, so it was back to writing it all out in longhand. But not with a pencil!
And now we’re head over heels in the digital world: we learn, shop, bank, play, make reservations, navigate our journeys. The underworld has also gone online. I resist offers to reclaim money owing to me if I just give my bank details to the caller. Telephone poles are disappearing; shares for digital companies soar. The work force is hardly that. It is scattered. Work is increasingly done from home. Is corporate worship a thing only of the past? Is my early feeling of alienation returning? Social media is not always very social. We can feel far away from everyone, and near to no-one. At least I don’t need a crystal set to listen to the radio. My phone is good enough.
Wendy’s mobile is still working, though I admit I don’t know the number. But I do remember mine. I need to. The landline at the house is disconnected. I rely on the internet, preferably connecting by WiFi. I smile when I hear what that stands for - Wireless Fidelity. The words of my friendly radio repairer of the 50s are still true. ‘Remember it’s not called a wireless for nothing!’
And for someone like me, suffering from presbycusis, who can’t hear very well, email or some other form of written communication, using the fingers, is just as good. Is that why it's called digital communication?
August 2020