I have never been the most technologically advanced person but I am not uncomfortable with technology. I am certainly not an early adopter of things but I am fairly comfortable with many of the changes which have been wrought over the last decade or so.
What however stumps me is the way this changes some of the other things we normally do. When I did my MBA (98-00) most of us did not have a PC in our rooms (though we had a pretty decent computer centre) but I think from the batch after we passed out everyone had one in their rooms - it was part of the course material practically. When I went back to campus a few times (within a couple of years of graduating) I found that the PC’s had basically created islands of individual rooms; and people had even their group meetings via net meeting rather than sitting together and talking the case out. But the limit has to be what a batchmate told me he came across when he went back to his dorm - a guy went to his room , logged on to the network to “chat” and then shouted out to the guy in the next room – “oye, come on to the chat” !!!!! Why couldn’t he have just strolled across? That’s not what chat was invented for. It’s like husband and wife speaking to each other on the phone from the living room and bedroom respectively.
We have changed our behaviour in so many ways that it’s weird. Sometimes I think- how did I meet people at assignations while at college, and indeed a couple of years at work, without a mobile phone. The mobile phone certainly makes it amazingly easy. However it is now taken to the other extreme. You plan to meet someone at xyz at 6 pm. At around 5.45 you get a text saying “will be there in ten – fifteen minutes.” Well, why bother texting at all? Equally strange is the text which comes at 5.50 – “have reached- standing outside”. Well, if you are outside, I will see you when I turn up… at 6 pm.
Let me be fair- I am not taking a moral high ground here. I do exactly the same things which I just mentioned above in the earlier paragraph (not the one before that – I do not chat over the net to someone in the next room). But doesn’t it strike you as a little strange that we do such things?
Let’s take another example – when I was in college we used to give each other birthday cards –it was fairly common practice. Came email and with it e-cards. I have stopped sending birthday cards to people for years now –it’s just an email wishing the person. That’s fine…but now with facebook it’s not even an email anymore. It’s just a “post on the wall” which inevitably is a standard “happy birthday…have a great day.” And if the poster is feeling mighty cheerful then a smiley gets added. I must admit I am not a great fan of that – I try, at the very least to “send a message” on facebook but again, to be fair, I too have done the “post on the wall” bit.
And of course, manufacturers have been ingenious in converting real life activities into online ones. You can play monopoly online, you can play scrabble online, you can build a farm online (Honestly- I have rarely come across anything more asinine than Farmville – I am sorry if you are a fan of it but that’s the way it is. I would strongly urge you to reconsider) …you can even ‘have sex’ online. And after the Wii you can perhaps play almost any damn game online - even real physical ones.
But for me all limits were breached when I saw some friends playing Antakshari over facebook. One song at a time! In the words of Sir Humphrey – it was the thin end of the wedge; the end of civilization as we know it! The most surreal bit was that some poor unsuspecting soul joined in at some point and put in a song…and he got a very stern response from one of the “early adopters” – “Dear …. agar tumne poora thread padha hota to tum jaante ke ye gaana ho chuka hai!” (translation - if you had read the entire thread you would realize that this song has already been played). I felt genuinely sorry for the guy.
But while it might be the end of civilization as we know it, it certainly won’t be the end of civilization. So, I wonder what else could happen through Facebook posts and comments in the days to come- and for all i know these might already be happening
- Chess matches played online- or perhaps Bridge. Maybe even Ludo or Snakes & ladders.
- Online parties – where you all gather in your own houses, play the same music or watch the same film and talk through the facebook comments. Oh, and of course, it has to be virtual food – though something tells me that people will not be quite so sanguine about that.
- Play book cricket online - you have a random number generator in facebook and each person keeps generating random numbers and you just look at the last digit as per the rules of book cricket. In a given thread the person who scores the highest wins. Alternately you could even form teams and set up a time. One person announces the start of the match via a post. Players then go one by one using the random number generator till they get out. You could even play test matches (When one team gets all out the other team goes) or limited over games (If the first team does not get out in say 30min…or better still, say 100 random numbers, their innings is over and the other team gets to play for the same interval).
- Twenty questions - this game is made for facebook, isn’t it?
- Write a short story – one paragraph at a time. You must number the paragraphs and you can’t comment again until at least 10 more paragraphs have been added by others.
- Perhaps one could do cryptic crosswords via facebook – one clue uploaded every hour or some such thing.
- Explore strange new lands, new civilizations – and boldly go where no one online has gone before - invite people home for a get together!
- On a more serious note, couldn’t you actually explore new worlds as a “space trader” in an online star wars sort of thing and trade space credits with people and inhabit new planets, etc.
- Passing the parcel – you keep tagging another person till the judge (whoever it is) says “time” and whoever has the tag at that time is out. Then you continue. You probably would need to form a set of players who will be playing and have all of them agree before you actually begin playing. Again things could be made more exciting by including a random number generator into the process which can be configured to be the judge.
- Online sex seems to be in the news nowadays but for the adventurous – on facebook would be the equivalent of dogging.
Come to think of it, it may after all be the end of civilization!
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