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Computer hobbyists are a dying breed - literally. Computer club officials say their members are getting greyer and fewer in number as home computers become steadily more common and treated more like the telephone: always there, always on.

They complain that young people no longer care how computers work. They are more interested in what they can do with them: games, mail, chat rooms and online virtual communities such as Second Life.

"Young people live life faster," says Lyn Goodall, president of the Melbourne PC User Group. "They don't have a need or a wish to know what is going on under the bonnet of their computer."

The modern young geek seems content to socialise online, rather than seek physical company of fellow geeks.

Anthony Caruana, immediate past president of iMug, the Melbourne Internet Macintosh User Group, suspects the era of the local user group is coming to an end.

"Online communities are taking over, and I am not even thinking of things as sophisticated as Second Life, but stuff like Yahoo! or Google groups and online forums," Mr Caruana says. "There's so much information and community available through the internet that the need for a bricks and mortar group is diminishing."

The two biggest Melbourne computer clubs, Melbourne PC User Group and the Apple Users' Society of Melbourne (AUSOM) were once both the second-biggest groups of their kind in the world.

Melbourne PC remains second-biggest in the world to APCUG (the US Association of PC User Groups) but its membership has declined to 9000 from an early 1990s peak of 11,000.

AUSOM, in its heyday, had more than 1300 members, and in the Macintosh sphere, was second in size only to the famed Berkeley Macintosh User Group (BMUG) in California.

"That was in the late 1980s, when everyone was computer-mad," says AUSOM president Dick Johnson. "The kids today think they know everything already, and they are not interested in joining a club to talk about the technology and learn about it."

Few seem interested in the social aspect of a club: making friends face-to-face and enjoying personal contact and debate, he says. Their meeting places - sources of information and, for want of a better term, soap boxes from which they can project their frequently aggressive opinions - are on the internet.

AUSOM continues with a still-healthy membership of about 900, but BMUG is no more, having morphed into a totally online group called Planet MUG.

The Victorian Macintosh User Group (then known as VMUG) had 1400 members in the mid-'90s. That plunged to just 116 by about 1998, before the club developed its online identity and became iMUG. Membership today is about 217, mostly people in their late 40s or older.

Noel Jackling, an iMUG program organiser, says that because the young now learn about computers at school, they don't need the kind of club support their parents required.

"Society itself has changed," Mr Jackling says. "People work longer hours, have less leisure time and are less inclined to join clubs for social reasons. Younger people do not feel the same need as we did to belong (to a formal organisation), and meet casually in places such as pubs."

Ms Goodall says the young ignore conventional computer clubs because unlike their parents and grandparents, they are not interested in computer technology, a point reinforced by declining enrolments at university computer science courses.

"As one young woman with whom I tossed this question around recently said to me: if the machine goes wrong, she pays someone to fix it or she buys a new one. She is not interested in knowing how it works," Ms Goodall says.

"She told me she wanted information instantly, wherever she was. She wants to read her emails, save her pictures and do all that kind of stuff. It is this need for instant information and communication that is driving the young."

iMUG tends to attract small business professional, rather than amateur, Mac users, but "the group is definitely on the grey side", Mr Caruana says.

A vigorous marketing campaign two years ago brought in about 60 new members, but Mr Caruana says the strength of iMug is now in its online discussion forum.

"Members can be active from anywhere in the world and don't need to physically attend a meeting," he says. The other factor leading to an older membership was that retired people tended to have the most free time.

AUSOM's extensive online discussion forums, essentially developments of the bulletin boards computer clubs revelled in before the development of the World Wide Web, offer similar advice and discussion.

The computer activities of the young involve not meeting their peers over a motherboard or a power supply, but socialising online; their screens are doorways to a global community of millions, via sites such as MySpace.

Middle-aged people with families see computers principally as work tools or, at home, for email and entertainment use. They are time-poor, making belonging to a club difficult, too.

source:Garry Barker/AP

image:AP:COMPUTER user group numbers are dwindling due to apathy, lack of free time, the rise of online forums and schools offering computer classes.

post-193-1176292164_thumb.jpg

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