Being Online

Last Friday was my last day at work. On one hand there was this immense sense of relief and a new found freedom from a gruelling monotonous routine – the clamour of client calls, half-baked accounts, and last minute iterations! But on the other, there was this sense of void, mutation, incompleteness – for I had to leave behind my laptop, my lifeline :(

The dated and defunct desktop has been ‘out of order’ for quite some time and my spouse is an equally addicted and voracious Internet consumer to share her laptop for long spells! To be offline is also to be ‘out of order’. Blame that killer application (yes it is literally killing my time!), nay killer phenomenon called FarmVille for adding to my woes… more on it later.

After much frantic research, reviews and recommendations, I finally got one from the HP Pavilion Entertainment Notebook family. I am back :)

The Internet has so ubiquitously permeated into our daily lives, into our very selves that we take it for granted … the virtual has created its own ecosystem with multiple cultures, voices and myriad users and consumers. The Internet is now forty years old (well sort of) and 2nd Sep was celebrated with a series of discourses, eulogies, parodies and so on. If we accept the ‘triumph of the nerds’ at University of California-Los Angeles lab when they passed meaningless test data to each other through Arpanet on Sept. 2, 1969 as the birth of the Internet, we surely have come a long way.

My first interaction with the Internet was with the mother of all killer applications – email – when we tentatively filled in the registration forms and figured our way through composing mails and attaching documents. During my years of research, Google (the colossal organizer of chaotic information!) became a verb, a noun, a way of life.
And now you have a oversaturation and overkill of communication and conversation channels – social networks, blogs, tweets, RSS feeds, virtual lives, applications and widgets – that it becomes virtually impossible to keep a firm hold on anything as given and socially embarrassing to acknowledge ignorance! Making friends and managing friendships, uploading pictures and watching movies, entertaining and being entertained, commenting and conversing, informing and getting informed, buying and selling – the growing reliance and dependence on the Internet will continue to grow.

Here’s an informative organized video that summarizes the processes and landmarks in the Internet’s course of journey so far:



Enjoy.