Lost in a Technological No-Man’s Land

This semester has been particularly hard on my electronics sparing none of my various devices. The count thus far is a broken phone, slightly injured camera and a shorted laptop charger. The phone replacement that I use is a dumb phone which manages to service just the bare minimum calling duties. This leaves me in a very precarious position since a majority of the work done recently requires certain applications which are taken for granted as available on every phone.

On the first day of using the dumb phone in place of my smart phone, I suffered from a lot of distress which I can only classify as withdrawal symptoms and had a hard time adjusting to not having a regular feedback/ communication device and being unable to maintain contact with my peers on a regular basis, not to forget the lack of games and other applications.

A few days after I settled down into the new routine and found replacements for my most necessary smartphone applications on my desktop, I realized the amount of time freed up by not using a smartphone and the opportunities it opened up.  The lack of a consistent reminder of pending work in the form of reminders/messages/calls meant I was far more effective at what I was doing at the moment. The lack of games in my phone also meant I was less distracted.

While a smartphone might be helpful in organizing a hectic schedule into manageable chunks, it also is a constant reminder of the work remaining for the day and is a psychological load.

The biggest problem during these days when I was not using a smartphone was maintaining contact with someone who does. The users of smartphones tend to use applications like Whatsapp/Wechat to communicate with others more effectively but this tends to leave out users of dumbphones. With no way around, I ended up using an emulator on my desktop to keep in touch with smartphone users. The parallel worlds of communication need to coalesce into a single method of communication to avoid further widening of the trench between dumb and smartphones.

Technological Evolution has left the world trying to sort itself into the various categories of phone users. The dumbphone user who couldn’t care more about the progress of technology. The avid smartphone user who uses every popular application there is. The workhorse who uses the smartphone to manage their everyday life. The highend phone users who have phones with far too many features to handle and several other such. This has resulted in certain trenches being formed in communication where only devices above a certain barrier can use certain means of communication leaving the others stranded. While evolution is but a way of life, the evolution of technology should not be used as another means of erecting barriers between the Morlocks and the Eloi. 

Of Censorship and Hectic Schedules

3 months is a really a long time to keep away from writing. The reasons are many but the most distasteful of the lot is the fact that BlogSpot was blocked on my institute internet for a while. Censorship in India has been on the rise over the last few years with intolerance becoming more of a norm than an exception.

There are several arguments that the promoters of censorship use to justify their actions. Public safety and the influence of the pieces of art to incite communal tensions are prime arguments and often seem to make sense if the act of maintaining piece is considered to be a balancing act on a knife’s edge. Other arguments used point to the influence that books have on young and impressionable minds ‘whose mind should not be allowed to stray’, this being a quote from an acquaintance of mine. This same argument has been used to justify blocking content on the net by institutes and other authoritative bodies.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

E. M. Forster

The flaw in all these arguments lies in the fact that they assume that the individual has no sense of discretion and is swayed by everything they read which is hardly ever the case. The rationality of the individual is ignored while the decisions are made on what is to be blocked. This is something that is to be considered furthermore when it comes to blocking sites online since everything read on the internet is met with a good deal of skepticism and further reading is done before a conclusion is reached by the individual. Blocking a site irrespective of whether or not the content is accurate lends an air of credence to the facts contained within and is consequently counterproductive to the original aim of blocking the site. Furthermore, blocking a site only means the mass moves to a similar parallel site to voice their opinions and unless a ruthless 1984ish authoritarianism is applied, there is no end to this.

Misuse of the anonymity provided by the internet is a known fact and while countering it may not be easy, it is not reason enough to block websites. Banning fire because it burns is not the way to go. Enforcing control, establishing identity and teaching proper use of the internet is the need of the hour.

On another note, my daily schedule has exceeded all bounds leaving hardly any time for blogging, hence the lack of posts even after BlogSpot was unblocked but random short posts like these shall keep coming in every now and then.