Virus that’s infiltrating all our lives
SONIKA UPPAL
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Is blaming technology the easy way out for depreciating moral values?
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Reading various news articles and features about the capacious world of internet, watching endless arguments about various networking sites, I decided sometime last year that it was about time that I got internet savvy. I am, after all a mother of two children and I should know all there is to know about technology which has become an integral part of our lives and certainly well before my children are old enough to start using it. Starting with mails, messenger, blogging, orkut, flicker, You-Tube, I put my fingers into every pie and well…...got in the bargain, a little wiser!
All’s not well here
Technology apart, it is the amazing reach to the array of people in far flung corners of the earth that gives the internet its soul and yet, it is such a sad world out there. Never before did it hit me as to how low people’s ethics and morals have fallen. It’s like a new virus that’s infiltrating all our lives. Suddenly, stories are pouring in from everywhere. Stories about husbands who are not interested in their wives anymore, stories about wives who don’t mind the absence of their husbands as, the online chum is a far more colourful alternative. Take a middle aged wife, working both at home and the office, bringing up the kids to the best of her ability with probably very little time to devote to herself versus an interesting sounding name, with an even more alluring picture attached, custom made interests to suit your nature, no prizes for guessing who the husband is going to fall for. It all starts with simply a hello and telling yourself "Hey, I am just making a new friend, nothing wrong in that." Before you know it, you are hooked!
The same is applicable to the wives’ also, he’s busy with his work, has deadlines to meet and she has a lot of time to kill, suddenly its so much easier to talk to this stranger in a far off place who is always there for her, the added element of mystery and romance cannot be denied. It all transforms into something that cannot be shoved under the carpet. People are openly conversing and exchanging phone numbers with strangers, whom they have never met without a single thought to all those treacherous perverts out there in the world.
Serious repurcussions
In spite of dire warnings by the police or the media, recently, a most intelligent, astute lady I met on Orkut, came across to meet us when she learned that we would be driving through her city, I wanted to shake her so hard when I met her, and ask her how was she to know that I am who I profess to be! More and more people are choosing to spend their free time with the online friend, ensconced in a room with their webcams, when it could be spent constructively with the family.
Our social and literary boom has not yet prepared us for such flagrantness. Maybe it is time to set our own limits, our own sense of the probable and take a step backwards.
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