Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Oh Google! What hast thou wrought?




Its a bloody nuisance.
Everyone is a freaking intellectual. 


The smart phone carrying wise-ass who has Google up his ass and who never stops to think that most of what you see on the internet is anything but the truth. 


Google has doomed the generation as much as it has helped it. Probably they now need Google to know how to spell Google.


Information is cheap. The hard-disk is cluttered with movies that we will never see, songs that we will never listen to, presentations that we don't give a crap about and eBooks that we will never even glance at. What then? We will keep on hoarding till the hard-disk crashes and then we will rebuild the collection all over again.


The days when we had to hunt and beg unashamedly for a single track of Simon & Garfunkel is long past. The gleam in the eye at the prospect of laying our hands on The Doors box-set is perhaps history. Stealing old mix-tapes of Dad and recording Beethoven's Symphony #5 on it are tales of the past. The round-robin-polling, once something new arrived in the group, is so laden with nostalgia. Information was shared but only among the sincere pursuers. 


The age of information has indeed arrived and jogging on its heel is the demon of ignorance which rears its ugly head and does a vulgar dance. We are being seduced by the overwhelming amount of information into a passive ignorance with the additional baggage of goldfishesque attention span. 


The general premise or assumption would be that as information becomes more easily accessible, the recipients ought to become wiser and more intelligent. However, apparently, it has led us to believe that the earthquake in Japan was a result of people tearing up the Quran or Bible (depends on which sms you got) and that not forwarding the pic of Ganesh to 50 people would result in 7 years of badluck. Wiser indeed! Intelligent much!


Perhaps, what I really wanted to say is that before internet, information was valued. We worked hard to get it and we clung on to it. Once accessed, we owned it and guarded it with the ferocity of an animal. 


Now we don't even know half of what we think we know. 


Information is illusion.


Our memory is fleeting. We can't even remember our phone numbers. The price we pay.




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