We adapt to ‘the new’ so quickly it becomes hard to think of how we coped without it just fine not long ago. Take the internet. I first opened an email account back in 2000 at one of the newfangled cybercafés at Ratopul. I was billed at the ‘introductory offer’ of 80 rupees an hour.
Those were the days when the Diversity Visa form had to be sent by the post. As the deadline to fill up the form approached, people thronged outside the General Post Office at Sundhara for a shot at the American Dream. Once, I remember a sizable room at the front of the post office being filled with DV applications. A whole room, top to bottom, front to back, crammed with nothing but letters with entreaties to be allowed into Uncle Sam’s shores! In 2001, my best friend studying in Ranchi was still sending me long, hand-written letters. [break]
Then the internet started catching on. The whole DV application process was shifted online. Soon, everyone had a Hotmail or Yahoo! e-mail account. Youngsters started frequenting cybercafés which were sprouting like hospitals are doing these days, in every available space, as the price of browsing the net plummeted. Online conversation with the opposite sex, over MSN messenger or Nepalnews chat room, became the thing to do. Emerging from their cloistered existence, the youth started to express their sexual yearnings from the safe remove of the cybercafé or their own bedrooms hooked up to noisy dial-up.
Initially, the online experience could be bewildering. With no one to show you around, you could easily get lost in the fast-expanding web. But once you got a little hang of it, it could be fun. In a month, you could have a reliable network of dirty-talking ‘girlfriends’ all over the world—Australia, the Philippines, the US, or right next door. For the millennial generation, internet was opening up a whole new avenue of casual relationships.
Internet offered many other distractions which would have been hard to access in the pre-net period. From its modest beginning, online porn soon evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry. You couldn’t visit a cyber and not be bombarded with a glut of pre-stored smut on the computers. My favorite guilty pleasure used to be a visit to one of the ‘trivia rooms’ at the end of a long day. I have spent entire nights, for months on end, trying to answer stupid questions. (‘Which Patti Page single topped the Billboards in 1952?’ Patti Page?)
Then I started trawling through those ubiquitous health sites from where I solicited both wanted and unwanted medical information. I kept at it even though self-diagnosis caused me great agony at times, as it must have done to millions of people all over the world. Formerly, if someone had a headache, they would perhaps have popped an aspirin. Now, they started googling ‘headache’ and were scared out of their wits when the top search result turned up ‘brain tumor’. This culture of self-diagnosis continues to be a headache for healthcare professionals to this day.
But more than anything else, the World Wide Web and internet revolutionized the way people communicated by demolishing the old barriers of distance and economy. I still recall one of the first (useful) group emails I ever got. It was form my uncle in New York City who had written to assure all his loved ones that he and his family were safe, just moments after the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001. Soon, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) would reduce the cost of intercontinental calls to peanuts, a manna for those in long-distance relationships. A friend of mine used to talk to his girlfriend in Houston for an hour, every single day without fail, every evening after college.
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Communicating over the web has come a long way in the last decade or so and more and more people seem to be getting addicted to it. The plight of this new breed of netizens is perhaps best exemplified by Pramila, a 28-year-old MBA student who always struggles to finish her assignments on time because she has to check her Facebook status every five minutes. Yes, she would like to change but as things are Pramila says she can give up on her studies, but not Facebooking.
I can’t imagine how hard writing a newspaper article would have been in the pre-internet age. Although this article is about the internet, I am writing it without any online help. It is difficult. I realize that I have become so used to checking online for correct idioms, verifying information, digging up relevant quotes and finding instant distractions on You Tube whenever I hit the writer’s block, I find myself paralyzed at being cut off from my handy go-to.
And I was dishing it out on poor Pramila!
The writer is the op-ed editor at Republica.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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