From the time when Pratik leaves for office till he returns for lunch, and then returns from work in the evening, there seems to be nothing better to do. Whereas there is. Lots of better things to do. Like reading. It need not be the newspaper. I can buy a book, or borrow one from somewhere. And I can write – more meaningful stuff than sending emails and ‘reaching out’ to people about getting their gadgets.
Uh, there are so many things to talk about, to read, to write. Then why is there an almost inescapable addiction to the internet?
I read an article in the Mercury News today about a study by someone on how Google has made us Stoopid. Lemme see if I can find it on uhm, well, yeah, Google..
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
There goes! It’s a must-read. I don’t think its a study or a research – just a person’s fears of degenerating brains and rotting societies. And guess who is at the bottom of the rot. Google. Well, not just Google. It’s the whole internet phenomenon. People using the internet for everything – using it as their clocks, their information storehouse, their maps, reserving space in the virtual world, leaving footprints that cannot be wiped out however hard anyone may try, immortalizing themselves but virtually (what a paradox, and what a pity).. the list can go on and on.
I happened to find similar angst on Pradeep’s blog. Here’s an excerpt – “When we write, we write
‘reviews’, and ‘thoughts’, we BLOG because we are too lazy to produce anything thats more than a fast food bite, our ‘thoughts’ are the regurgitation of stuff that we ’surfed’ up on the great GOOG!”
And it goes on – a terrifying form of despair – the greatest abyss of despair.
Pradeep says, “We are all too dumb to have a single new thought in our COMBINED, COLLECTIVE heads, all put together. We pretend to be intelligent, but we are slightly more sophisticated copycats than our nearest cousins in the evolutionary hierarchy. Our inventions are accidents, our discoveries are through
chance, and we think HUMAN is a compliment. We can see the problems of our world, but we are too, take your pick, comfortable/relaxed/dumb/lazy/scared, to do anything about them. We could have saved the world, instead, we will, like our parents, blame the gubmint/amrica/arabis/corporatocracy/communalists/commies/democrats/casteists, for the state of our world. If we are lucky, the world will be a better place when we are ready to die, but remember, it will so despite, not because of, us!”
Something about his words rings true, and rings louder each time I read it, rings to the point of discomfort. Truly, what are we doing? Sunk into passiveness, are we just lame pawns in a larger schemata of the universe? Who then, are the active, the ambitious, the aroused? The only arousal evident within us seems to be a base desire for petty comforts.
What does it take to defy life, defy the Scheme? What does it take to emerge larger than life? Surely, its not the RSS feeds that hurtle into our Readers every second, surely it is not the emails sent by equally petty people pretending to be (and convincing themselves to be) oh-so-important, surely it is not just browsing the web hoping to find something which may perhaps redeem the pointless surfing of the days gone by. In fact, I am convinced that even Stumbling, for all the good it might bring (once you start, you’re bound to stumble through at least ten great sites) is not going to supplement us with artificial intelligence enough to make us super (not superhumans, that would be terrible too).
The measure of success is not just per capita income anymore, it is the number of computers per household, even per person. How wonderful it used to be, not many years ago, to talk for hours with friends, dreaming of owning a laptop – a laptop that would bring me that much closer to being elite, which would give me information, chats, pings, feeds and tweets anytime I choose. How unfortuante it is to have so much – to have four laptops lying around in the house, stealing away my life. My life was way beyond what can be contained in a laptop – but now it has shrunk, a miserable old shrunken rag, easily fitting in and even getting lost in the messy canvas of dirty old rags like me – all contained on a wide 15″ laptop screen, dirty with daily fingerprints, yet bright because of the glaring LCD light shining from under it, eliminating all trace of the thickly layered grime.
Ghastly, I want out. I want my life back – supple and wholesome.
