The use of electronic media in remote communities

In a world where going away means growing away, remote outback communities can now plug into an evolvoing global fibre-optic satellite network without their members leaving the family or the land. These networks and linkages lie on different planes; they operate in different dimensions. On the ground, outback highways do not follow the traditional routes mapped out by the original inhabitants. Electronic tracks do not replicate the hub-and-spoke models of old roads. Understanding the balance, articulating the borders, navigating the network, means vesting the law within a very different social framework. Several factors skew this social framework: the balance between inbound and outbound movement, between the inflow and outflow of information, ideas, and commodities. For Indigenous Australian communities wedged between the inflow of capital and goods and the outflow of culture, globalisation disrupts rituals and cycles of learning that have endured for centuries. Other system/delivery designs, information priorities, and economic control models lie on the horizon. With nobody left untouched in even the most remote section of the bush, each individual within each community faces the challenge of discovering and reconstructing the boundaries of that new horizon.