For quite a while now, I have been concerned about the ageing amateur radio population. Before my stroke in 2013, I visited quite a few radio clubs giving talks. All had one thing in common: ours was a male, old aged population with few young people and girls. From a recent report from Germany reported on
Southgate News, this would appear to be a worrying trend. Within 20 years most active amateurs will be very old. I can see several dangers:
- The hobby could just die out.
- Amateur radio magazines will get hard to find (they are hard enough to find now!).
- There will be fewer ads in magazines for new gear.
- Manufacturers will stop making amateur gear as the volumes are too low to make a profit.
- Dealers will close.
Now, I
very much hope I am wrong, but unless we attract
and keep younger people, who see no magic in radio as most of us did, our hobby is doomed. Sadly, I do not have a magic bullet.
See
http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2019/november/germanys-darc-faces-an-aging-membership.htm#.Xd0n6e2TLnE
But what changed? I didn't get to sixty last month by getting a license late in life. It was 1972 and I was 12. The rules in Canada had just chaged, before April that year you had to be at least 15 to get a ham license. So not onkycould I not take the test earlier, but likely for a brief time I was the youngest ham in Canada.
ReplyDeleteSo most of my life I've had the license, I grew old with it.
So what changed? Say the rules changed to make it easier for older people to get a license. The technical test and morse code was not an impediment when I was 12, indeed it was a challenge when I was very capable of learning.
But when older you aren't in the same place. I suspect too many think that technical stuff has no relevance. And the rule changes have veen in place long enough that the hobby has been reoriented towards less technucal interests, and people who were licensed later in life. So the hobby speaks to tgem,rather than a 12 year old reading about exotic places and fascinated with technical matters.
I don't know what it's like to be a kid now. But I certainly remember how much it all meant when I was starting out. But those licensed later in life don't have that. They didn't see black & white QST, with the Jeeves cartoons and the technucal articles. They didn't start in HF often with a horrible general coverage receiver and one tube transmitter, they entered with a 2M tranwceiver.
The awe of the world at 12 is amazing, but you forget that, or if you came to the hobby late, never had it. So those hams can't "speak" to the young since they aren't in that place.
Michael
What changed? The internet.
ReplyDeleteOn top of that, the hobby has become intensely backward-looking -- obsessed with nostalgia for a past that has no relevance to younger people. Even weirder, it's full of old people who think that *they* are the technical ones, and that the younger people are the dummies. It's the opposite, but the old hams think that their narrow mastery of an arcane corner of electronics is "state-of-the-art" -- while they struggle with laptops and have no idea what coding is.
Hmmm... so why aren't young people attracted to something that's full of people living in a past that their parents barely knew, and full of technically-deficient people who believe they are geniuses? And don't forget, all of those old people truly believe that those "kids" are jealous of and intimidated by that arcane tech. Then you have the condescending attitudes expressed openly and continually by these old hams, the subtext of which is "You're an idiot, but I'll grandly overlook that and teach you how to be like me". It's not hidden nearly as well as those old hams think it is. Old hams think that they're so 'nice' and 'helpful', but the truth is that they're arrogant, condescending, alienating, and elitist. They know what's best for you, what you 'really' want (even if if you don't), and much of the 'help' is little more than *indoctrination* into the 'proper' opinions that must be bleated on cue.
What else? The weird group-think in which rational thought is discarded and replaced by straw-man arguments, the binary logic (genius/moron, unquestionably Good Guy/irredeemably Bad Guy), the social hierarchy that's only slightly less rigid than the military, the total lack of introspection and tolerance for viewpoints outside the "party line", the rig-snobbery and contempt for inexpensive gear, and the idea that "making contacts" (rather than actually talking) is what people are after in today's technological context.
I could easily go on, but yeah... the problem is *obviously* that the licensing process is too easy. Sheesh!
It's not issues with technology that are the barrier. It's the *toxic social environment*. And none of the old hams can see that their "good intentions" are counter-productive, because they're obsessed with the notion that they are "good guys" who just tend to intimidate ordinary people with their 'brilliance'.
The social environment is crucial, because -- believe it or not -- this is a hobby that *requires* the participation of *other people* to make it work.