This topic came up with fellow blogger Todd KD0TLS the other day when I was discussing the negative feedback items I received from my recent blog posts. Apparently not everyone enjoys reading that the radio club that they belong to is dead. Or that HF is full of naughty radio operators. Heh.
The question I posed on the air during our recent round of this conversation topic: "Why the hell would anyone join in as a new amateur / licensee to this hobby? What do people see in it?" Discounting the obvious Preppers and my fellow engineers, amateur radio is much like unicycling or juggling. Fun hobbies on their own, but fringe hobbies at best. Those things are stuff that someone's uncle or cousin does, not something that you or normal people do.
After discussing the common discussion points with the 3k licenses that we add nationally each year, and not hearing many of the 3k new license voices on FM, the issue of who we are recruiting to the hobby came up: We have been recruiting the somewhat curious, the "I want to track my wife's vehicle on APRS," and "I want to collect another license / certification" crowd. This crowd naturally turns on the local FM repeater, finds little activity or a pile of geriatric (old) hams chewing the fat about their medical problems, and immediately turns off the radio and chucks it in the closet.
What we need to "save" -- or better yet -- "change" is the heading of the hobby ship to recruit more creative people of all ages, genders and disciplines.
In a recent WIRED article "Why Startups Should Steal Ideas and Hire Weirdos" it became obvious what amateur radio is missing: The creatives. Form the WIRED opinion article:
Remember CFR 45, Title 47, Part 97, where it defines the Purpose and Basis of the entire existence of the amateur radio service?The most consistently creative and insightful people are explorers. They spend an enormous amount of time seeking out new people and different ideas, without necessarily trying very hard to find the “best” people or “best” ideas.Instead, they seek out people with different views and different ideas.
§97.1 Basis and purpose.
The rules and regulations in this part are designed to provide an amateur radio service having a fundamental purpose as expressed in the following principles:
(b) Continuation and extension of the amateur's proven ability to contribute to the advancement of the radio art.
(c) Encouragement and improvement of the amateur service through rules which provide for advancing skills in both the communication and technical phases of the art.
See? Even the government calls radio operating, social interaction and idea sharing an "art." WIRED calls this social interaction, sharing of ideas, "exploring" (above). Explorers, like amateur ops chatting, engage in what WIRED calls Idea flow:
Idea flow is the spreading of ideas, whether by example or story, through a social network — be it a company, a family, or a city. Being part of this flow of ideas allows people to learn new behaviors, without the dangers or risks of individual experimentation, and to acquire large integrated patterns of behavior, without having to form them gradually by laborious experimentation.
This means we can learn much more quickly by socializing with other people then attempting every radio experiment on our own. When some of my friends point out that "amateur radio hasn't innovated anything new or technical since FM repeaters came around in the 1970's" they are technically correct. But that's not the point of the service from Part 97.1 parts b and c. I would argue that the simple sharing of ideas is good enough to justify the amateur service, and it would appear by the government's choice of words, they agree with me. WIRED continues:
The continual exploratory behavior of humans is a quick learning process that is guided by apparent popularity among peers. In contrast, adoption of habits and preferences is a slow process that requires repeated exposure and perceptual validation within a community of peers. Our social world consists of the rush and excitement of new ideas harvested through exploration, and then the quieter and slower process of engaging with peers in order to winnow through those ideas, to determine which should be converted into personal habits and social norms.
[...]
Social Learning Is Critical
Copying other people’s successes, when combined with individual learning, is dramatically better than individual learning alone. When your individual information is unclear, rely more on social learning; when your individual information is strong, rely less on social learning.It's not about finding the best ideas, or that every licensee puts on an amateur radio repeater on the air or builds the next Software Defined Radio. It's about spreading ideas. It's about knowing how to use a repeater and how repeaters work that makes for a technically diverse population of radio ops. Not building the next innovation to make it to commercial success. Discussing complicated things in a way that people can learn by simply listening to the two-way radio is engaging, interesting and exploring. Talking about your most recent surgery is not.
The aging population of amateur ops is another common topic that comes up on the air during rag chews. While I enjoy poking a lot of fun at the older hams, I have learned a great deal from their conservative, suspicious, slow to change ways. It's good to have someone on the air to bounce new ideas off of that is just as excited as you; it's even better to have someone to poke holes, slow down your roll of ideas and find areas were you did not think things completely through. WIRED continues:
When people are behaving independently of their social learning, it’s likely that they have independent information and that they believe in that information enough to fight the effects of social influence. Find as many of these “wise guys” as possible … and learn from them.
[...]
Diversity Is Important
When everyone is going in the same direction, then it’s a good bet that there isn’t enough diversity in your information and idea sources, and you should explore further. A big danger of social learning is groupthink. To avoid groupthink and echo chambers, you have to compare what the social learning suggests with what isolated individuals (who have only external information sources) are doing. If the so-called common sense from social learning is just an overconfident version of what isolated people think, then you’re likely in a groupthink or echo chamber situation. In this case, a surprisingly good strategy is to bet against the common sense.
When I first got my license I thought that the local radio club is the best contesting group in the country. Until I discovered local super-contest station W0AIH in Eau Claire, I thought that the big contesting group in town was the group that rolled with no club station and two HF radios they took out of storage a few times a year. Additionally, I thought that I had to learn morse code to be a "real" contester. Not so. I needed to expand my experiences with radio clubs in the region to completely understand that many clubs suffer from groupthink (above), that they start drinking their own Kool-Aid. This kind of behavior results in the local club morning commute sounding like an echo-chamber of "how great we are, ra ra ra" on the local 444.100 "the dot one" repeater.
Until I went to Hamvention in Dayton, Ohio, I thought that funding for an amateur radio contest station was limited to one guy in Eau Claire. It turns out that with enough funding (more then the ARRL) you can have a station like DARA's W8BI. They do an amazing amount of contesting with what essentially comes down to five guys, two of which operate voice on a regular basis from the club station. See? You can raise money for amateur radio endeavors, and it's totally cool to be unlike other clubs and hams in your area.
...
Reading the complete WIRED opinion article, I learned that everyone with an amateur radio license has a duty to diversify their sources of information and think critically about where they fit into the hobby.
All new and old amateur ops have a unique background and set of experiences they can contribute to the hobby -- and better yet, their creativity.
Let's face it - nobody knows what the future of amateur radio is. But you and I can create the present a place that is fun, inviting and engaging for new and potential amateur radio ops to listen to. We can create a creative, joyous place where new ideas are shared, vetted and sometimes implemented. We have control over the present, and what tone and what energy levels are shared.
-matt
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