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newindpress on sunday - News Items :: Maalan: "The Internet as a technology driver

Without the Internet, there would be less of an incentive to invent and less invention means less progress. The Internet makes it possible for us to know more of what is happening around us. And being aware means also becoming aware of how much more we can do. For instance, if you know blogs are the current big thing, as a technology creator, you're going to try and come up with more applications that'll help you make more of blogs. The Internet by making us more aware of what is possible, makes us want to come up with more ways to make the most of what's possible. In short, the Internet has allowed the human mind to use itself even better and helped humankind punch way above it's weight category.

The Internet by being the most powerful tool invented, so far, for better knowledge sharing and collaborative working allows the human brain to work as a collective whole. And that is the greatest technological invention of Internet times: the collective human brain working from different parts of the world, in unison.

The Internet as an economic accelerator

What the telephone did for the economic, and social, aspirations of the people in those days, the Internet is doing for the aspirations of people today. If the telephone jump-started the economy of that time by accelerating the process of acquisition through greater desire dissemination, the Internet has done more of the same for this day and age, in turbo-charged mode.

Consider this, if there was no Internet, there would be no BPO Revolution. And without the BPO's, there would be less disposable income in the hands of the people from the developing world. It's the Internet that makes it possible for companies to get work done from a labour force spread across all corners of the world. Thanks to the Internet, we have BPO's. Thanks to the BPO's, more people have money. More money, means more economic activity for more people. And more of the trickle-down effect of economic development.

The Internet as a great leveler

BPO is a great enabler and the enabler of this enabler has been the ultimate enabler, the Internet — the great leveler. Thanks to the Internet, you don't have to own bombs to destroy old economic equations. In the past, armed force was a big factor in economic negotiations. In fact, thanks to the super-importance of armed forces, economics was not as important a factor in world negotiations. Now, thanks to the Internet, things like cheaper intellectual capital and shifting economic indices are becoming powerful tools of world negotiation. No longer do you need a bomb to blast the world into submission, you just use the Internet.

The Internet as a social engineer: The Internet is media. And while we may like to think we make the media, it's often the reverse that happens. We form our impressions of Michael Jackson based on what we're fed by the media. The media social engineers us into believing what we believe about Michael Jackson. The media is now more fragmented than ever. We have more places than ever before from which to get our news. We can choose whom we want to help us make up our minds. The Internet is, today, the most powerful tool in this process of making up our minds. Every society is socially engineered by it's media.

The Internet has changed the way we receive and transmit information. Because the Internet allows us to get our news faster, the nature of news that gets reported has changed. When the nature of what gets reported changes, the things that matter to us change. As a society, we change. And the one big change driver over the last five years has been the big I. And for those too lazy to go find out at from that information mine on the net, www.wikipedia.org, what 'social engineering' means, here it comes in one, crisp, beautifully crafted, pithy line: it's the process whereby society is made to behave in a particular manner based on the information it is fed from external sources.

The Internet as an industrial revolution

If the Industrial Revolution made life easier for humankind by introducing machines that mechanised repetitive tasks, the Internet is like the industrial revolution of our time that will change life for us by making life exponentially easier for humankind.

The Industrial Revolution allowed us to do less by helping us do more, through machines. The Internet allows us to do much, much more by bringing even more things to our desktops. If a machine made spinning yarn easier, the Internet makes buying yarn, even easier. Whereas the Industrial Revolution introduced us to the concept of boredom, for the first time, the Internet allows us no time to, even, be bored. Think about it, hasn't time become the biggest casualty of our age? So much so, you don't even have time to think about it!

The Internet as a relationship doctor

Blogs, emoticons, etc. How interacting with people doesn't need people anymore. It has done more for communications between humans, and humans, than anything humans had managed in all the years leading up to the Internet.

The Internet as a weapon of mass destruction: More potent in today's technology driven times than any nuclear weapon of massive destruction, the Internet is the weapon Democracy used to steamroll itself into formerly unconquerable lands. In simple, English, if more people are being freed in prisons across the world, the Internet can take a fair share of the credit for it. If more governments are becoming less oppressive, it's got a lot to with the Internet — case in point, the successful Orange Revolution in Ukraine. The Internet has made it easier for us to express ourselves. And the ability to express oneself easily can be — as has been demonstrated in formerly oppressive societies around the world — a very powerful thing.

The Internet as a nuisance: The Internet is to our lives what the TV is/was to living room conversations. Why is it to our lives what TV is/was to living conversations? If you don't have the Internet, you're probably a lot more socially adept. It's the constant connectivity enabled by the Internet that makes the Internet such a nuisance. That makes weak humans want to keep checking for email, keep wondering whether they're wanted somewhere, and keep getting distracted from what they're doing by the thought of what they're missing. Without the Internet, the pressure to be connected wouldn't be the irresistible nuisance it is. It's always there, in front of you, enticing you, tempting you with the forbidden in the land where nothing is forbidden, and most things free.

— NSE staff with inputs from Avinash Subramaniam

The net and I- Sujatha

The Internet is described as an ‘accidental superhighway’. It started as an American Defense Department project as an academic exercise to protect sensitive data from the Russians during the Cold War. Look what it has eventually turned out to be? Every day I get junk mail promising minimum six inches of penile enlargement!

The internet is a perfect example of chaos theory in action. Patterned disorder, a shape underlying apparent randomness. Three major innovations have contributed to this orderly disorder. Increased bandwidth, the world wide web (sometimes called world wide wait) and hypertext mark up languages.

Today it is possible to search the web and get useless information from across the globe transcending language, culture, geography and centuries in five seconds.

Like many others, I had my first acquaintance with the net through email. Friends started contacting me in bizarre abbreviations like asap, btw, tcalss (I never got to unravel this) Then came mail from strangers inviting me to join various fraternities and kinky societies. Then came the Viagra sellers and finally hate mail.

I quickly changed my mail ID and password and I am lying low and open my mail with a very nervous finger with a prayer Lord give me this day my daily anti-virus.

The net is a great source of information, a veritable boon to writers like me. But there is a catch. When writing Maniratnam’s movie Uyire (Dil Se in Hindi) the director wanted to know the expansion of RDX. I sent a query in Yahoo! and got the first ten of about 10000 entries. I got the answer yes. Research Department Explosive. But I also got to know how to prepare RDX at home. The website talked about gelatinous sticks, nitric acid, glass stirrers and thermometers (‘It may explode keep off’). And to top it all, a question. Do you want to order some? Click here and give your credit card number. I quickly switched off and waited for the RAW men to get me. You get the point? The internet is like the river Ganges, beautiful marigold flowers float along with dead bodies.

Soon, I learned how to use it effectively using combinatorial search except occasional lapses like once when I wanted to know about the little bird ‘tit’. I was flooded with photographs of mammaries. The little bird tucked perilously in between them. Try it!

Here are my tips.

Abandon the search precisely after two hyperlinks. If you are not careful you will start with Ramanuja and end up in the rain forests of Amazon.

Consider the net as a huge resource. A virtual worldwide library. To make effective use, you should know the shelves and the cataloguing methods.

Avoid blogs, they are endless ego trips. Be very choosy in adding to your favourites list. It becomes too big.

McLuhan said, “Each new technology obsoletes an earlier technology and brings back a much earlier technology.” The internet has obsoleted letter writing, but with so much of bandwidth available and computing power, it is bringing back our ancient matrimonial practices like, the prospectives, meeting and talking to each other virtually and perhaps even marrying in cyberspace.

Nuptials are a little difficult.

(Sujatha is a popular Tamil writer)

A Village BPO?- Maalan

To the 500 families living in Maravan Mangalam, a hamlet near Kalayarkoil in Sivagangai district, internet is not a fancy. It is their lifeline. Deprived of a government dispensary, Internet grants them access to medical consultation through internet. The initiative came from the people, the village panchayat, to be precise. They are not familiar with the expression telemedicine, but nevertheless, they know that they can reach out to the 'computer doctor' as and when they need.

Poongothai is not fortunate enough to attend college after her Plus Two as her father is a landless farmer. But now, every morning, she is rushing to her office, a BPO, in her village Kizhanur in Thiruvallur district. She, along with 15 others, is processing legal documents of a US firm, for a salary of Rs 2000 per month. Yes, it is paltry. But Poongothai takes pride that she is helping her family, “like a man.” She sounds confident and happy, a digital bliss. Village BPOs have come to stay. A $170 million US corporate, Lason Inc, is spearheading the initiative. As an end-to-end outsourcing company it offers franchise on the terms that the franchisee has to provide the real estate, while Lason will invest in the hardware and training.

About 15 women assemble every evening in a school at Kottivakkam, a suburb of Chennai, to learn computer skills. A bunch of youngsters, some of them are from giant software corporations, teach them Open Office and MS Office. The woman, all from a self-help group, are keen to pick up the skills as they believe it would help them in managing their correspondence and accounts.

Digital divide would become a thing of the past soon. The information super highway is reaching out downstream and, more importantly, it is changing life. At last, India has awakened to the 21st century.

Digital technology is fast changing the way we look, work, speak, read, write, buy and sell. Wearing a collarless rum red slack to office does not raise eyebrows anymore. The boss would have seen that the previous night on television. ‘Boys’, hardly 23, sleep at home in the forenoon and fathers do not scorn as they know that he has returned after a strenuous night at the BPO. Girls leave for work at 10 in the night and mothers don't grumble because they know she is going not to party but to a call centre.

These days you hardly see a gaudily painted tin hoarding in any city. Digitally-printed acrylic sheets have taken their place. Advertisements seduce you to walk into ‘real digital experience’ at theatres. Mamis enquire about the snowfall at Philadelphia with their son through Yahoo! chat. And non-resident Tamils write exciting reviews of Anniyan in their blogs on the day after it is released. Of course, train tickets are delivered at home.

But the language is the causality. My daughter sends a message, “v r @ ECR. r u comg. food's gr8 here,” and claims it is English. Maybe. As Su-Du-Ko has replaced the crossword, one day, we may have poems written in this alpha numerical language and, who knows, may even win Booker. Life, after all, is stranger than Sci-fi.

(Maalan is Editor, Sun News)"