Our take on the Internet revolution

There once was a time, a long time back, when the keyboard was something you tried to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on and a mouse was something you killed on sight.

All this until a certain Mr. Babbage decided to turn the world on its head and introduce the computer. Back in those days, computers used to be bigger than small countries. The first useful computer running on an Intel chip, about the size of Sri Lanka, had 1 MB of memory (A present mp3 song takes up about 4 MB).

Now, all that’s changed, with the advent of the PC-internet revolution starting from the late 1980’s.  Today, everything from Toblerones to Torpedos, is available on E-bay. The age-old war tactic of the Trojan horse has morphed into the tiny, undetectable Trojan virus. 5 year olds are now discussing the relative pros and cons of the latest episode of ‘Dexter’s Laboratory’ on Orkut.

Today, any combination of letters from the English alphabet, typed into Google will yield more than a million results, from ways to curl a football free kick into the top corner of the goal to Barrack Obama’s preferred chicken dish. (google/obama+chicken+dish has 4150000 results)

Indian weddings are as elaborate as some nuclear reactor processes. Upto now, the bridegroom had to generally be an IIT-IIM passout with a couple of Nobel Prizes and an income greater than that of Warren Buffet if he was to make the prospective in-laws suitably pleased. Now add to that, the criteria of having more than 500 friends on Face Book.

 Men of steel turn to emotional wrecks in their attempts to arrive at the socially acceptable figure of 500 friends, going to such lengths as to send requests to utter strangers, they have never met, and will possibly never meet in their lives. (Check out a previous post in this blog on Face Book)

Sometimes, though, touch can be regained with long-lost family through social networks, like Face Book.



The internet has brought about so many new avenues of information as well. Now there are apps to find out the exact length of your small intestine, the number of wrinkles on your face when you will be 75 years of age and so on!! AMAZING RIGHT?    

L

Professional videos, hidden camera videos, home-made videos and all other forms of moving media available have been posted on YouTube to such an extent that any further post has a 60% chance of breaking a copyright law. Only a video on YouTube can bring something as nightmarishly ghastly as the popular hit single ‘Silsila’ into the public eye. (Viewers who watch this video are advised to keep emergency first aid at hand)

Modern college and school assignments follow an exceedingly simple base rule- Questions by teachers, answers by Wikipedia. Linguistically gifted students might take the extreme pains of rearranging the Wikipedia content to make it look remotely individualistic. Now that this divine invention, Wikipedia, is available as an app on the mobile phone, examinations are answered by Wiki too.

Today it is a paradox that if the Internet was taken away for a month, the big daddies, the USA, Europe and the rest would sink like a fishing boat in an East Asian tsunami, while the neglected economies of Africa and South America would still be afloat. Internet activity has brought about the Middle East revolution, has acted as a support system in the Indian anti-corruption movement and much else. (Another factor altogether that ‘Poonam Pandey’ scored more internet hits than the mid-east revolution and anti-corruption combined).

The Internet says Poonam Pandey is of more importance than Anna and the Egyptians

One of the internet advancements we can expect to see in the near future in nammade Kerala:-



Strange indeed that the lives of the most developed species on the earth is governed by a bunch of wires, a couple of nonsenical sounding URL's and a sackful of 8-character passwords. Tsk.