Tech tales

Hi,

Yesterday in Bombay the Airtel connections were down due to some reason and i noticed people spent more than 4 hours just calling up the customer care to check when the network will be up. The quintessential cell phone has taken up the most important place in our lives. Its unbearable to live without it.

Nobody prefers to walk up to their colleagues sitting 5 feet away to inform/share something – they put it in mail or use a communicator! When the internet connection is down for a few minutes, thats the only time people actually look away from the screens of their computers and notice there are humans around. All for the sake of technology which is just distancing us away from each other. I wonder “is technology for us or are we for technology”

At a seminar i recently attended, i noticed participants were more interested in mails coming into their blackberry’s and pda’s than what the speaker had to share, or which city or country the other participants were from. Lunch was another excuse to catch up on all missed calls (most of them they would realise would have been from bank agents tryin to sell their newly launched credit card- hehe) and provide instructions to office. The laptops seemed to be the only ones to enjoy undivided attention in the hall. Some participants were polite enough to lower down their laptop screens when spoken to directly (modern day etiquetty i guess).

At parks i notice couples walking – each talking on his/her respective cell phone – wats the point of spending time together? When we need opinion on something we (instead of walking up to the friendly neighbour) prefer to look up on the internet. We have no time to meet childhood friends from the neighbourhood, but have enough time to add unknown faces as friends on the orkut account. We go out for dinner and stay home for a movie – strange times we are in.

I think its time we started celebrating ” no phone/laptop day” just to remind ourselves that we still are very human.

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Saba