In this modern world, our lives are dictated by technology. Are we too dependent on our gadgets; forgoing personal space and privacy?
The memory is still vivid. My father is teaching me how to use the internet, a wee bit reluctantly. The modem is squeaking and beeping, its lights switching from red to orange to green; Baba is showing me how to use the mouse, getting a little impatient when I get amused by the idea of a computer remote and start zooming it in circles on the mouse pad to see how those crazy movements play up on the screen of the stout personal computer.
As always, I was biding my time to believe the internet phenomenon. I wasn't sure communication could be as easy as Baba claimed it would become then onwards. I was asking incessant questions and he was trying to keep up with the answers. His apprehensions of introducing me to the internet got more and more evident with each agonising minute that the dial-up picked speed and my questions became more pointed. As soon as he logged me in, he dragged himself out of the room. "Be careful," he said, as he handed me over to the crazy World Wide Web. Like all fathers who know momentous times when they come in their daughters' lives, mine was prescient too. This was the day when modern communication irrevocably changed me; took life on a whirlwind ride of discovery, information, and impatience. Yes, the memory is vivid.
It didn't take long to get used to the idea of the internet. Emails and chat rooms seemed like they had always been there after merely a few weeks of use. Three to four years later, the first cell phone came home. In the first year of cell phone, the style of use was quite distinct. Those were the days of rationing talk time, deliberating, arguing and prioritising the use based on which of the siblings needed it more. With amazing rapidity, the cell phone novelty also lost its charm, became a commonplace necessity. In less than six months, the vegetable vendor also began giving missed calls to announce his arrival. Communication patterns changed right in front of our eyes.
Days without cellphones and not being constantly connected were quite good, actually. In between late college festivals and missed buses, downpours, punctured tyres and impromptu college hangouts that delayed homecoming or meeting up without warning, we - our friends and our parents - still kept our calm, presence of mind, patience and faith. The anxiety and impatience brought by excessive channels of communication had still not begun invading relationships.
Without the luxury of calling and keeping a check, parents would wait patiently, sometimes anxiously, sometimes furiously, sometimes just standing helplessly by the door looking at the road in anticipation. In their communication-devoid wait, they nurtured and demonstrated an inbuilt strength that perhaps we as tech-savvy future parents will never know.
Today, amongst friends, colleagues, even some elders, one unreturned called, one seen-but-unreplied text leads to a flurry of assumptions. One day without the phone sends us into a mini panic attack. One day without the internet seems deadly for life, business, survival. Are we devolving into a society that is so dependent on communication tools, that an absence of these seems like an absence of communication itself? We are confusing the modern tools of connectivity with communication. If we weigh the nature and quality of connectivity on most social forums, this becomes evident. It is more like a quick scan of others' lives, a quick glance into the illusions others perhaps want to portray. Then again, often there is too much information out there, a thriving groupie mentality that brings the worst out of even the best people, a one-upmanship on the number of recent travels, dresses, likes, comments...
The lines between personal and professional life are also vanishing. Selecting, maintaining and even rejecting friendships is becoming more and more difficult. We need to alert ourselves to the pitfalls of hyper connectivity before we begin to see ourselves through a different social mirror and begin to communicate through affected social filters because social networks have unwittingly made us way more social than we can handle.
Under fire of the volcano of hyper connectivity, sometimes I wonder if we have forgotten how to read between the lines, to catch the finer nuances of body language, tone, emotions and manners when we take refuge behind the shorthand lingo and hyperbolic emoticons on WhatsApp and Viber. In the age of a quick Google search and photoshopped Facebook profiles, is it too outdated to mourn the loss of mystery, space, privacy and genuine feelings?
Where do relationships stand in the face of hyper communication? Do we have the same patience, vulnerability and faith that our parents had when they fell in love? Could we imagine our love lives without the aid of WhatApp, Viber, Facebook, FaceTime or Skype? Was human communication meant to see a day when relationships could go into a void because of power failures and low internet connectivity? Think!
