Shall I buy my music from iTunes, Spotify, or Amazon? On CD, Mp3 files, or by subscription? Shall I record my videos on the Canon video cam, the iPhone 11 pro max, or my MacBook camera? Shall I read Chetan Bhagat’s latest novel in paperback or Kindle or wait for the audiobook to come along? Oh, wait…. isn’t the PDF version of the novel already circulating among WhatsApp groups? Shall I get the Xbox One X, Nintendo, or PlayStation 4 to play my video games on? Shall I store my family photos on Google Photo, I-Cloud, or Microsoft One Drive? Or should I keep them safe in my 2TB hard drive, my SSD, or my 256 GB pen drive?
Decisions, decisions. Choices, choices. Expenses, expenses….
Technology goes on & on, never settling down. It just gets smaller & more powerful. Before you know it, your new gadget is obsolete. The big tech companies make sure of that, introducing new operating systems that can’t be installed on your old gadgets, or stop manufacturing the spares. Depressing, isn't it? And bloody expensive.
When is it all going to stop? Or has it just begun? How many more of these gadgets will we be suckers enough to buy before we run out of all our money, and our cupboards are full of stuff which was red hot technology two-three years ago?
I am not saying that I want to go back to the Stone Age. Far from it. Technology is great. We now have the world at our fingertips when wielding our smartphones, don’t we? But there is a downside too, something that I’m becoming aware of with growing alarm, with each passing year. Technology has made our life complicated.
That is what I want to focus on today—not the Utopia of high tech comforts, but the possibility of a dystopian future.
Let’s look at social media. Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter… their tools created some wonderful things—reunited lost family members and old school friends, found organ donors, etc. They started with these good intentions—hoping to make a decent profit as well, to sustain themselves. All very heartwarming. But now? It appears they’ve gone berserk. You and I are now paying the price.
What is that price? It’s not just the money that we are forced to shell out every few years to upgrade our gadgets. It’s far more than that.
Firstly, our privacy—it has gone to the dogs. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google are all competing for our attention. According to the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, they are trying to change what we do, what we think, who we are—gradually. Their business models are to make sure that their advertisers get their money’s worth. Everything we’re doing online is being tracked, watched, measured, monitored, and recorded. For example, exactly at what image you stopped and looked at, and for how long. This information that they gather about you they feed to their advertisers. When you scroll down, refresh… there is something new on top of the screen—haven’t you noticed that? They are showing you things you’re likely to be interested in because now they know.
Hacking is a more damaging loss to our privacy. Data theft sold to the highest bidder, a cyber-attack on our banks cleaning out our accounts, controlling national Elections—the possibilities boggle the mind.
Secondly, this is the age of Disinformation—false or deliberately misleading information, often put out as propaganda. It's important to fact check the things we see. Just because it's on the internet, it doesn't mean it's true. WhatsApp gossip, morphed images, fake news going mainstream, character assassinations—just another day in this age of Disinformation. Facebook posts have been known to incite violence and mass killings, incivility, more polarization, and greater inability to focus on real issues.
Thirdly, we have the problem of Excess Information. There is an overload of info online. While the information available might have increased manifold in the past couple of decades, our brain's capacity to process the same has not. Nor has the time on our hands. This has affected our attention span—too many things to look at or listen to in the limited amount of time we have.
Next is our Net addiction. We are e-mailing, texting, chatting, Tweeting, and updating our Facebook or Insta pages all the time on our devices, when not reading messages from others or watching the clips they have sent. Why do we do this all the time? It seriously affects our productivity at the workplace and our relationships at home. Family conversations at the dinner table have become a thing of the past, with everyone glued to
their cell phones. Nobody really listens to one another. People's time has been replaced by screen time.
I’m running out of space, but I need to mention the Health aspect. Kids today, forced to go to the park to play by their irate mothers, sit on the benches, and play video games on their cell phones. There is also the rural aspect, where lakhs of poor families, unable to afford a smartphone or 4G services, opt-out of mainstream education altogether.
We need to wake up and smell the roses, enjoy the simple pleasures of life—a game of chess with Dadaji, a good book on a Sunday afternoon, date nights with the phone switched off, or a walk in the park with a loved one. Put your gadgets away for a few hours each day, please. Try it. The heavens won’t fall.
You should watch The Social Dilemma in case you haven’t. Very informative. But on which device will you do so? The TV set or the desktop PC? On which telly? The 4K UHD type or the OLED? Or on the new iMac Desktop that has a 10-core Intel Core i9 processor with AMD Radeon Pro 500X series graphics… yes, the one with up to 16GB of GDDR6 memory? And what the @#$%^* does any of that mean?
Beetashok Chatterjee is the author of Driftwood, a collection of stories about Life at Sea. A ship’s captain by profession, he joined the Merchant Navy at a young age and now misses it, having just retired after completing more than forty years at sea.
His book is available on Amazon. Click here.
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