Oh! I so miss the old internet; the one which was in existence 6-7 years before. All it could do was , atleast the useful things were shopping, look for news, hunt for jobs (monster.com ruled those days) and yes as far as i know the only social tool that people used and cared about, Chatting. It was a great way to connect with old lost friends, people living in other side of the world, meet up with new people. It was going great. Internet was perfect. The internet was a nice calm place. But as it turned out, it was as we say in hindi, Aandhi ke pahle ki Shaanti thi (Calm before the Storm).
The Aandhi(Storm) in this case ofcourse are the plethora of social networking tools that have since flooded the internet. One of the early leaders being Facebook and myspace here in the US and orkut in India and south America. No idea if China ever had one or even if it has, the government probably runs it. Even that was acceptable. I mean the world could handle it. now we had a better way to connect to friends, share our pictures, get in touch with them and what not. I was happy with my good old orkut. Back then we did not have facebook in India. So orkut was the Rage back then. Then as we(Indians) always do, we decided to copy and come up with a dozen more variants of orkut. All of sudden everyday I was being invited to join a new social network. And I too just like the others was riding on the big wave and I was a proud member of all the networks that existed back then( dont know if any of them are still alive). Be it the Hi5s or the zorpias or the ibibo's, you name it..I was on it.
Fast forward six months. I was tired of daily checking into all my accounts and see if anybody cared to send me a message or if someone had done something interesting. As the time went by, I had lost interest in almost all of them barring Orkut. You see it had the early player advantage in India. So i didn't mind keeping track of the first one. And in any case, the new must use social network, where you could express your opinions freely without any restrictions and the whole world could read it (again when i say the world, i mean all countries except China, no offense) was Blogs. How could I have resisted it. Next thing you know, I am on blogspot too. I think I did it dutifully initially, but then work and gre piled up and blogging(too liberal with english) took a backseat.(i still have close to 20 half finished posts). Since then I have been planning to restart my blog career hoping to win a nomination for the best blog someday ;-).
Fast forward another year or so circa Fall 2008. I now lived in New York. So I had no choice but to kick start my facebook stint. I mean thats what all of US was doing. So to be like them I had to be one of them. My affair with facebook lasted the least, the reason being most of my friends were back in India and they loved their dear old orkut back there ( Back then atleast according to mail forwards the founder of orkut was making shit loads of money, at that rate he could've bailed out all of the US during the great recession of 2008 single handedly). Another reason being facebook was still only by invitation and very few people in India know someone here. So facebook faded away pretty quickly. But then facebook opened it gates and indians to look as much cool as the rest of the world came in and crashed the party. So now facebook was back on my radar, not just because of my friends but also thanks in largely to farmville. Even games have become part of the social networks and are their cash registers are ringing. So now I had my IM tools, orkut, blogspot, facebook and its numerous the so called social games and lastly my social news network reddit.
I wasnt finished in any sense yet. Somewhere around 2009 another startup came up with the idea of microblogging. I thought instead of writing boringly long posts, i'll try and express my thoughts through 140 characters. Here i come twitter. I had nicely settled into it. And i did feel complete now. I had everything social going in my life. Forgot to mention I was also part of Linkedin, ofcourse to maintain my professional connections (sadly though barring 10-15 people, most of them are my friends).
And around 24 hours before, I also became part of Google Buzz. I had to, it was like obsessive compulsive disorder. Just because its there, I had to be in. I have sort of become addicted. Not just me, its people all around the world. I mean these days instead of handing out their resignation through mail, people tweet that too for the whole world to see. One of my friends in facebook gives out quarterly updates of his life(Off to lunch, Off to work, Off to bed and what not). I am sure just like me everyone else too will join the bandwagon on Buzz. Some will persist with it while others will go back to their old trusted ones; but that besides the point. The important thing is today there are too many of these social networking tools. While i agree it has been useful at times, the bad thing is it has been a mere waste of time and resources at most other times. Take for instance Reddit (there are many others like it...digg,stumble-upon, so on and so forth). Every day i see people there literally wasting their time. Be it office or be at home. Every little thing is posted and commented upon. While its good to have fun at times, but people don't realize that the amount of time spent on these networks has increased exponentially. So instead of say actually working during daytime, people spend time looking for new stuff on internet and then post it on reddit. Instead of spending some quality time with their friends or family or even with themselves they are completely hooked onto it. It seems with the arrival of so many social tools, Our actual, our REAL social Life has shifted into a Virtual social world. While the corporations owning them are having a field day at the office, we as their users are becoming their slaves. We are more or less ruled by them. Something needs to be at the earliest to ensure that they are confined.
Thats why old internet was so much better. You had fun for few minutes/hours each day and then you were off to your real life.
0 comments:
Post a Comment