Something extraordinary has happened over the last decade. It has taken us exactly that long to become aware of the massive amounts of information the world contains, and to configure our innate curiosity to seek what technology can do.
Today, technology is being deconstructed to the personal. When man landed on the moon in 1969, technology had a grander aim. Visions of human colonies on Mars could become reality, it was thought. Today, we find ourselves humbled; inter-planetary travel is taking longer than anticipated, and shallower economic pockets mean space research has all but been restricted to observation. Instead, technology has become an anthropological marvel; it now relates to how societies interact with each other, how individuals connect with each other. A home without a computer—once a behemoth so massive that five mb of data required a machine as big as a room to store it—is a rarity; soon, a pair of glasses will be all that you need to access the virtual world.
Such progress has heralded a different phase of civilisation, where information is deified. Proving true the adage that ‘knowledge is power’, Wikileaks changed the way the game is played. But Assange did not herald this movement; it was the Internet that challenged the notion that information is the monopoly of the state. Some are still pushing it further; the ‘hacktivist’ group Anonymous, for instance. Human behaviour is modified by the Internet; a Facebook campaign over rising food prices can overthrow a government; a Twitter photo of a young girl shot by a sniper can bring thousands together. Information has moved out of the hands of the government—very soon, ‘classified’ will become the new cliché. And a population, connected by the invisible packets of data, will transmit what was earlier local to the global.
Like the binary code that data is transmitted as, our lives too will become dual. Bring out the social media activist on Facebook, while continuing to work as an accountant at a bank. Already, we are close to a schizophrenic life, where the boundaries of the digital and the real begin to merge. A memory comes attached with a tweet, or the number of ‘like’s it generated. A ‘like’ becomes an emotion of joy, an event to be cherished.
The duality of the real and the digital also allows for a sense of empowerment. Social media champions its own heroes, and new villains are sought every passing day. On the Internet, everyone is a Marxist. But an egalitarian society must find its own champions to further a cause. Hash tags highlight the flavour of the day, and 140-character voices find their space in the real world. Sometimes, the empowerment is false. A war criminal cannot be apprehended by the sheer volume of shares, nor can the presumption of familiarity with an alien culture. But the curiosity it creates more than compensates for these failings. We are more aware than we ever were in the history of human evolution, and that surely is good enough a reason to push ourselves further.
Naturally, state structures are afraid. Traditional power structures operate on the basis of the notion that the governed will always know less than the governors, hence the attempts to control the nature—and at times, the volume—of information reaching a population. The Internet operates outside such restrictions, its traffic moving along a super-highway of bits and bytes. Proxies exist to break even the most stringent of walls. Even the most hermetic of societies, North Korea, finds it difficult to tie its population in its web of lies any longer.
This deconstruction of technology has changed the way humans interact with each other. Facebook’s 900 million users probably have more conversations online than in real life, and the sheer volume of tweets—340 million a day—beggars belief. An increased presence in the virtual world is also a catalyst for a shift in the way we conduct business, propelling societies to invest more and more in this parallel creation. As this decade goes by, our online worlds will continue to merge into our real selves, and it would be foolish to disregard the prospect that one’s online presence will soon officiate as the only identity.
What will thrust this forward will be our own curiosity. Like Carroll’s rabbit-hole, it will take us to frontiers of information rarely seen before, and make us question where we are exactly. Like a vast expressway, but of ideas and networks instead of automobiles, each moment online will reveal a new facet of humanity, a new milestone to pause and gaze. The journey seems to have only begun.
0 comments:
Post a Comment