Department of Computer Technology, Monash University, Caulfield
P. O. Box 197, Caulfield East 3145, Australia
chris.avram@monash.edu.au
The case study was undertaken in order to document how Australian society is using the available Information Technology in the home in the early 1990s.
The Department of Computer Technology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia has recently completed an investigation of the use of commercially available ISDN products and services as a means extending an office based local area network to a small remote or home office[1]. The present paper records observations of the patterns of use of information technology available within the home, technology made available for the primary research on ISDN.
A recent survey of Australian home offices by the Yankee Group Asia Pacific has reported the typical composition of an Australian home office [2].
This paper is a first hand (and so possibly not impartial) anecdotal account of the availability, usability and utilisation of information technology in an Australian home in 1994. It is intended that this paper will be of archival or historical value as a 'point in time' observation of one extreme of the spectrum of use of home oriented information technology. In this way this paper is intended to make concrete some conceptual perspectives of this technology.
This paper will give biographical details of the members of the household, some physical details of the size and composition of the home and its environment. The paper then goes on to catalogue the information sources and technologies available within the subject home. These parameters of the subject home will be contrasted against the Australian average and the average home office.
A later section of the paper details some observations of the modes and patterns of use of the various technologies.
Finally some conclusions on usability are drawn. By documenting the public infrastructure needed to support the technologies available and used, conclusions of relevance for developing countries can and will be drawn. This was one of the major aims of the HOIT-94 conference.
The house is within easy walking distance of public transport, schools, shops, a free lending library and video library.
The home is supplied with good quality public infrastructure services such as clean stable electric power, surfaced safe roads, trains, trams and busses, reliable telephone service and frequent postal service.
By way of comparison to the norm, the home is in an inner suburban neighbourhood so has better public transport than is typical in Australia. Also due to it's proximity to a large commercial zone, has access to ISDN telecommunications service, this too is atypical. The house is a typical middle class urban home in many ways.
The Yankee Group [2] reports that 17% of Australian households run a home business and 49% perform some office work at home. Un fortunately, these figures can't be used to infer the existence of space dedicated to office work.
One can distinguish between information sources available to the household and those available in the home. So a public art gallery or museum which was accessible to the household may not be a regarded as a source of information in the home. On the other hand a free to air or affordable television broadcast, if able to be received on equipment in the home would clearly be a source of information in the home. The scale is not as clear cut as these two extremes may suggest. Is a free lending library a source of information? If the library was a comfortable walk away from home and if accessible to all members of the household equally, perhaps yes. If the library is not easily accessible, independently, by all members of the household (perhaps because of poor public transport or the need for a car) then perhaps the answer is that it is not a source of information available in the home or even to the household. The forgoing analysis leads to the conclusion that just as a reliable electricity supply is required to enable access to many modern information technologies, so to the public transport system should be seen as essential infrastructure enabling access to the older more traditional information sources.
Many of us living in affluent, dense and stable societies take freedom and ease of travel for granted. The subject household is in a large urban centre and has fast frequent public transport. There is a free lending library with many periodicals and a large fiction, non fiction and reference book collection. The library is 400 meters from the subject home. Public art galleries and museums are within thirty minutes ride by public transport. The public transport system is accessible to teenaged children. Almost all Australians live in these circumstances. The fringes of the cities may be a little less dense so libraries may not be quite as accessible and public transport thins out on the fringes. Australia also has large rural areas and small isolated populations with very poor public transport and cultural infrastructure.
The home is situated a few hundred meters from a shopping centre with four book shops, and a news agent selling local and international newspapers and magazines. The subject home has a morning newspaper delivered to the door.
Communication and electricity are the modern replacement for transport in many ways. Dealing first with electricity, in Australia, almost everyone has access to affordable electricity. Some remote homes don't and must generate their own. Some rural homes have unstable electricity supplies (subject to brown outs and black outs). The subject home has typically experienced three blackouts per year, each of a few minutes duration or less and almost always preceded by warning by way of an electrical storm.
Communications technologies will be considered in two main groups, broadcast technologies and telecommunications. The subject home and Australia does not have cable or pay television. Australia does have some remote area and special purpose satellite television. These are not available in the subject home. Radio broadcast is available via 20 frequency modulated (FM) very high frequency (VHF) stereo radio stations and 10 amplitude modulated (AM) medium wave (MW) mono and stereo radio stations. Most of these stations provide entertainment (music) and leisure information (sports results, talk back radio). Radio and television are mostly culturally homogenous. There are non English language radio stations and public access stations but these are less than 10% of the stations. The national broadcaster (government funded) operates a network of local radio stations, a national network and a 'multi-cultural' network. Australia does not have a civil emergency radio network. Most rural areas have access to at least one local commercial station and the national network. The subject household like others in all capital cities are much better served by having a variety of radio stations. There are six radio tuners in the subject home and one in each of the two cars.
Broadcast television is available via three commercial television stations; national general purpose station and one national 'multi-cultural' station. Open university and school based services are available on these stations. Each of the television stations transmit some form of teletext signals. One station transmits, Australia wide, a 900 page information magazine on teletext, this is a broadcast system transmitting information similar to viewdata [3] but encoded and transmitted along with the television signal. The on-screen teletext magazine includes financial markets information, sports and general news and other information services such as a complete television guide for all channels and weather forecast and other advertising information. Most Australians have access to a similar level of broadcast television service. Even very remote area dwellers have three channels via satellite. The subject home has three television sets and three video cassette recorders. One television set has teletext facilities.
The subject home has four copper twisted pair cables from the local branch exchange to the home. Two pairs are in use, one provides a plain old telephone service (POTS), the other provides a basic rate integrated services digital network (ISDN) service. The POTS service is an analogue (300 - 3300 Hz) international standard telephone service with tone dialling and a variety of service options such as call waiting, enquiry call and local area call diversion. The subject household does not subscribe to these extra services. Most Australian house holds have a telephone service, according to the survey, very few subscribe to these extra services. Even the most remote can subscribe to a satellite delivered telephone service. Urban areas and major intercity highways are covered by a cellular telephone network. The subject home has a high speed (14 400 bits per second) data and fax modem attached to the telephone line. The Yankee Group survey [2] shows 4% of Australian homes have a modem and 8% of homes which have a home office have a modem. The subject home doesn't have a fax machine, the survey showed less than 0.5% of Australian homes have a fax machine.
The ISDN basic rate service provides two 64 000 bit per second channels and an 8 000 bit per second channel for signalling. This service is eight times more expensive (annual rental) than the POTS service. It is only available within a five kilometre radius of a local branch exchange. The subject home has a dial up ISDN link to the Internet via the Australian Academic Research network (AARNET). This provides a 128 000 bit per second (16 400 bytes per second effective) link between the Internet and the local network within the home. There is very little use of home and small office ISDN in Australia in general [2].
The subject household is served by a daily postal delivery service. Letters posted within Australia are delivered within about 2 days.
The home houses a library of about 1 200 volumes including the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The information processing technologies include two desk top industry standard architecture personal computers with a total of 700 megabytes of disk storage. A laser printer, photocopier, 14 400 bit per second modem and ISDN 128 000 bit per second bridge to the Internet and place of work of the adults. Subject A and D also have exclusive use of note book computers. According to the Yankee Group survey, 33% of Australian households have a personal computer. This figure increases to nearly 47% of home offices have a personal computer. Note book computers are less common, 3% and 6% respectively.
The household has access to communications, word processing, data processing and entertainment software. Compact disc read only memory (CD Rom) reference material includes dictionaries, encyclopaedia, cinema reviews and others.
The household has the physical resources, technology, access to the information sources, access to data band width and the technical support and educational resources which by any measure would classify it as information rich. The usage of the available information technologies is described in the next section.
The subject household has addressed these factors. Do the adults telecommute? Yes, subject A and B both work flexibly at home or in the 'real' office, typically each will work eight to ten hours per week from home.
Telecommuting is increasing in Australia (the Yankee Group survey predicts a slow 5% growth per year), so much so that the Australian Industrial Relations Commission has made an interim industrial award called the Australian Home Based Work Interim Award 1994 [4]. This dictates working conditions for members of the Australian Public Sector Union. The award covers many aspects of working conditions including security arrangement and occupational health and safety. The award is available electronically over the Internet via the world wide web at the following universal resource locator (URL).
ftp://archie.au/ACS/teleworking-agreement.txtThe tools enabling telecommuting were said to be the telephone, personal computer and in the case of subject A (an information technology academic) the ISDN high speed data link to the Internet. The other office equipment such as photo copier, laser printer and fax modem were needed to 'complete' tasks at home.
This ends a brief discussion of information technolgies used by adults of the subject household while at home. Following is a similar discussion of the children's school work, the paper then turns to the leisure activities of each group.
The school aged children, subjects C and D, never worked at home while school was in session. School home work was completed either on a school provided notebook computer, in the case of D on average 1.5 hours per week, or on the home personal computer, in the case of C on average 0.5 hours per week. Subject D has little other home work. During 1993 D completed two research assignment each took about 3 nights work and non were researched on the available CD Rom materials. Paper encyclopaedia, the home library and public library were the sources of information. Subject C also almost never uses CD Rom based material. Why is that so? The reason is not familiarity with technology. Subject D is a competent Logo programmer, DOS and Windows computer user. CD Rom based games are used extensively (two to four hours per week). The reason is also not accessibility. Homework time is often time parents have set aside to be spent with the children. So the office equipment and office space are available. I would conjecture the reason is cultural. The children have learned, and continue to learn, to get their information from books. Books at school are individually owned for most subjects. There are very few CD Rom drives and very few CD Rom disks at school. Despite all the predictions of the value of CD Rom as a research tool, subjects C and D would rather manually search for information in a set of home encyclopaedia and even walk to the municipal library to borrow a book than use a CD Rom.
The rest of this section discusses the leisure use of information technology for leisure activity.
Subject B spends 0.5 hours per day reading a newspaper, from one to three hours watching television and an average of one hour per day reading for entertainment books borrowed from the municipal library. Very little time listening to the radio and less than 15 minutes per week on the telephone. Subject A has a similar pattern but uses the radio as a source for news rather than the newspaper. Both A and B use teletext almost daily for weather forecasts and financial news.
Subjects C and D watch three to four hours per day of television. Subject D plays computer games for about half to one hours per day as a substitute for some of that television time. Neither child spends time searching for information on the Internet.
In relation to this issue of information search over the Internet, an interesting anecdote needs to be told. One child, subject D, has exclusive access to a note book computer for school work. He is competent at Logo programming, is able to read and follow instructions for the installation of software. He independently investigates the use of computer games. When these computer games get too difficult, he knows of the existence of the Internet news group containing hints for players of personal computer games, he often requests searches to be done on his behalf and although he has easy access to the network, he had not tried to get the information he needed himself. If the information was presented on paper, he would read if it was available electronically, he would not search. This behaviour changed abruptly with the provision of alternative news reading software.
In order of household member hours, the most used technologies are the free to air television system and the home office.
Who Information Technology Hours PurposeThe time spent using the technologies by each member is listed under the headings, person, information technology, information source or information gathering support technology used, broad purpose of use, average hours per day of use for purpose.
per day
All television 3 entertainment/information
A,B home office equipment 1 telecommuting
B borrowed books 1 entertainment
D personal computer 1 entertainment
A high speed data link < 1 telecommuting
A radio < 1 news
B newspaper < 1 news
All various others
The technologies used in aggregate in order of use are television, telephone, library books, newspapers, computers, radio, high speed data links, then sundry others.
Subject A began to work from home in the late 1970s. At that time, 300 bit per second portable acoustically coupled printing terminals were used to maintain contact with the office and directly support the work functions. Development in increased data transfer rates have been steady since then. Prior to the introduction of ISDN to the home, network file services have not been feasible. Since the introduction of ISDN network data browsing has become available. As Internet backbone data rates have increased, there has been a corresponding increase in the volume of data available. The multimedia browsing functions of the world wide web protocol and the video on demand of the multi media backbone (mbone) protocol have pushed the limits of ISDN capacity. Though the ISDN link to the Internet is not active for more than about 15 minutes per day on average, the high data transfer rate is required to enable the high data rate protocols.
There is a miss-match between the content on the Internet and capacity of the home based information technologies available. In the case of A, there are relatively few electronic journals available to support on line research, though the technology and content to demonstrate the possibility is available.
Australia is about to get pay television. It is as yet unclear what technology for delivery will dominate.
In collecting this information on information technology use, the low level of use of electronic forms of information for research when paper is available, was noteworthy. Especially when the relative role of television and books for entertainment is considered. Television dominates entertainment in the subject household. Without defining active and passive, perhaps when we are active, we like our information source to be passive, when we are passive, we like our information source to be active.
[2] The Yankee Group Asia-Pacific. (1994) 'Telecommuting and the Home Office in Australia', YankeeWatch Pac/Rim White Paper Volume 2, Number 1, January 1994, 1-14, The Yankee Group Asia- Pacific, Sydney, Australia.
[3] Winsbury, R. (1981) 'Viewdata in action', McGraw-Hill Book Co (UK) Ltd.
[4] Australian Industrial Relations Commission (1994) 'Australian public service home based work interim award 1994', Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Melbourne, February 18, 1994, 1-23.