Sunday, January 11, 2009

Sharp transformations

Sharp transformations dot our times like stars dot the milky way. Mostly we were swept in so swiftly and painlessly, we scarcely noticed the enormity of change that was upon us.

One of those sharp transformations was of course the Internet. No, not a cliche - I at any rate am never able to cease marveling at it afresh; the sheer concept of it; what it brought to pass in our lives in two decades.

Two of the big changes that it brought along were where we go for our knowledge and where we do our shopping. I'll talk about those two here as they touched my life.

I became a professional engineer in this century - in fact just six years ago. Where did the engineers of yester-year learn their trade? I exaggerate, but not overmuch, when I say I learned mine on the Internet. And I am unable to comprehend what it would have been like for a callow new-minted engineer in the years before. Books don't teach little practical tricks. Bookstores and libraries don't always stock the most urgently required books and journals. Then, the senior colleagues were the well-spring of wisdom. The scope for favoritism and politics (gender, race, any other) that left - not pleasant to think of. Sure, there's plenty of scope for politics on the Internet, for instance in the online communities or inherent in PageRank. All the same, the Internet places a huge amount of collective wisdom equally at the disposal of every aspirant wisdom seeker. The Internet truly was the great democratizer.

And then, there are one's other hobbies, pass-times and interests - things that may not mean much to the people one spends time with routinely in office or at home. In my teens and twenties I loved reading Dostoevsky. I owned most of his novels, novellas and short stories. But being an engineering student, I had no point of contact with the literary types, much less Russian literature types. I got to hear of Bakhtin and Joseph Frank at the Dostoevsky group at Yahoo Groups - an extra-ordinarily lively and articulate group that vanished unexplained from the web some years ago - and I was thirty then. And then of course, I needed Amazon.com to lay hands on those infinitely precious volumes as soon as possible. I thank the Lord for having given me some part of my life to be lived in the age of the Internet. The color that it brought to my life has been blessed.

But its not just to do with profession and hobbies. All those odd bits and pieces of info and good advice that one went to the neighbor for - who was the doctor that did wonders for your mother's friend's vitiligo - or virtigo - that kind of thing - now the Internet provides us with those so much more capably and efficiently. Then the Internet's the great new expanded neighbor.

The Internet has been, through and through, the great new wave in education. We are surely generally more educated, skilled and knowledgeable today than we were two decades ago.

So I list the Internet's grand epithets:
- The great new democratizer
- The great new wave in education
- The great new expanded neighbor
- The great new shopper's stop

and of course the list can be expanded.

Everything, actually, in a mammoth scale. In a world that seemingly had lost its taste for grandness, the Internet is an amazingly grand new denizen. And we are still trying to comprehend the implications...

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