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CITY LIGHTS
Fatal addiction
C.K. MEENA
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We are determined to do away with human beings, and when we are faced with glitches in automation, we migrate to the virtual world
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PHOTO: K.R. DEEPAK
Future shock Maybe all relationships in future will be held together by emoticons
A restaurant on St Mark’s Road has a sign over the door of its air-conditioned section that says laptops are not allowed. What prompted this diktat was the habit, of many of its customers, to order lunch and then hog the table for the rest of the day, tethered to their gizmos like goats to wooden pegs. Maybe the restaurant manager is doing them a huge favour, when you consider what’s been happening to some young South Koreans. They are dropping dead from e
xhaustion after staying online in internet parlours for days without a break. Gaming is their fatal addiction. All play and no work makes Kim a dead boy.
The computer hasn’t started killing people in India, or so I believe, but it has been causing grievous bodily harm. The software might ensnare the brain but it’s the hardware that cripples the body. I should know, having been practically banned from touching a keyboard for over a month, and restricted to a Spartan diet, bitter potions, and brisk oil massages by two girls named Bincy and Jincy.
Compulsive Internet use, a disorder cured through de-addiction clinics, has not significantly affected Indians but one does see evidence of Compulsive Mobile use. If it isn’t the name of a disorder it ought to be. It is one that Indians are patently suffering from. Some are already experiencing ring anxiety – hearing the phone ringing when it isn’t – and falcellarms could well be a precursor to wholesale addiction. For the urban young, the cell is like a detachable sixth finger. I wonder why chain snatchers haven’t thought of it before – making off with the hundreds of mobiles that are on display especially in the hands of young women after dark. Easy pickings, I would imagine. The mobile gives women a false sense of security: As long as they are talking to someone they feel they are not alone.
Convenience has been the mother of many an invention but the most addictive of them have been those we use for communication. And virtual communication is replacing the physical, like it or not, in more spheres of our lives than we’d care to admit. Extreme examples are always available abroad. The hottest gifts this Christmas are cells, laptops and cameras – for kids who aren’t old enough to go to school. There are “helicopter parents” (guilty of excess hovering) who use mobile technology to spy on their kids’ every move, and six-year-olds who play with virtual pets and dress them up in virtual clothes which they buy with virtual money that they earn by performing virtual tasks. Recently a teenager in the US committed suicide because her internet boyfriend badmouthed her and ditched her – and he didn’t even exist! Then there’s cyber bullying, if you please. Instead of kicking sand in your child’s face the cyber bully leaves menacing messages in her Inbox. That’s one more thing for paranoid parents to worry about: violent, silent words.
Urban children in India are growing no less dependent on the computer. When I saw a 12-year-old play gali cricket online with his virtual team-mates I thought I’d seen everything. And then I heard of someone whose kid sister had given him a hug on Facebook. Maybe all relationships in future will be held together by emoticons. Aren’t virtual friends already encroaching on territory once reserved for flesh-and-blood ones? I should put friends within quotes since the word today can mean people you barely know. A “friend” you’ve never met in person will barge into your Inbox and invite you to join a bunch of other equally unfamiliar “friends”. They will then proceed to tell you what books they are reading, as though you should care.
We invent gadgets for our convenience and when they break down, we feel doubly inconvenienced. Of a whole row of ATM machines, only one works; all others are o.o.o (out of order). Two out of three automatic water bill payment machines are o.o.o. After being pawed too often by clumsy forefingers, touch-screen PCs on railway platforms go o.o.o. That’s when we start missing the middleman. But we are determined to do away with human beings, and when we are faced with glitches in automation we migrate to the virtual world. We start banking online, paying bills online, ordering books online, buying movie tickets online... and then we start chewing our nails over Internet security and the threat of credit card fraud.
I am not an enthusiastic visitor to the virtual universe. If I had a choice I would see photographs in an album rather than view email attachments. I hope I may never be constrained to read an e-book. Most often, technology works against the interests of people like me, which is why I was hugely kicked when I read about the desktop printer that creates solid objects. Architects, dentists and so on have already been using the 3-D printer to build prototypes but it hasn’t hit the market. Imagine the scene when it does. Your child wants a new toy so you download a design or create one yourself with 3-D design software. You hit the Print button and out pops the custom-made toy. Call it going back to the future – a hi-tech movement from the virtual back to the physical again.
(Send your feedback to ckmeena@gmail.com)
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