Reported By:
| Edited By: G Sampath |Source: |Updated: Nov 19, 2013, 11:17 PM IST
Mobile phones are turning us into an atomised aggregation of worker bees
Today is World Telecommunication Day, apparently. Oh yes, they’ve got a day for that too. You no longer have to be a father, mother or earth to have a day dedicated to you. You could even be an irritating little gadget, such as a mobile phone, and the world will still remember you with gratitude and celebrate you with affection for one entire day.
It’s a day for all of us to stand up, hold hands, and emit a collective beep of gratitude: “Thank you, God, for such advances in telecommunication technology, I no longer have to speak to human beings when I have a problem with my credit card, I can happily spend hours pressing keys and chatting up machines. That’s right. Press 1 to wait for a human being, press 2 for bad music, press 3 to scratch my back, and press 4 to buzz off and not bug us again, you moron. Thank you for calling Damn You bank.”
Yes, today is the day for you to thank communication technology that has empowered you to cry into answering machines, break up on sms, and watch porn on your palm. It is the day to say thank you for ingenious inventions such as twitter.com whereby you can, with one sms, tell infinite number of people what you are doing at any given moment.
If you want to inform the international media, for example, that right now you are in the middle of the longest pee in the world measured height-wise — that is, from the edge of the Grand Canyon — you can do so, thanks to advances in telecom technology that has given us Twitter.
It is also the day to celebrate the most poignant moments in a cinema hall getting marred by a lout saying, garv se of course, HELL-OW. It is the day to commemorate all your dates where the object of your lust spent the better part of the evening breathing into a shiny plastic box instead of you.
It is also the day to celebrate people killing each other on the road because their brains were too focused on a disembodied voice while they were driving. Yet, the World Telecom Day is also the day to mourn the death of travel, for no matter where, and how far away you may be, you can never leave home. Or office.
Because home (or office) is only a beep away. You could be at
You know it’s got to be the wife. You pick it up, and no, it’s not the wife. It’s Morpheus, and he’s just called to tell you about the Matrix and how what you consider Reality is controlled by machines and is not real.
But seriously, we need to think hard about whether it is we who are in control of the technology we use, or is it the other way round. As an experiment, try and live without your cellphone for a month.
And keep a journal of your withdrawal symptoms. By the time you start screaming in agony and frothing at the mouth for your handset, you would be ready to understand
the true meaning of the telecom revolution.
While it’s all very well to go into an orgy of congratulatory sms-ing to observe World Telecommunication Day, we also need to ask ourselves: is cellphone technology really a boon if it makes us dependent? How cool is it to have less control over our lives and environment at the individual level?
Networking and communication technology, while being wonderful testaments to human ingenuity, are also things that entrap you. If mobiles were really a progressive force, we should be able to live with them or without, as we choose. But the power of choice doesn’t exist for most people who have to get by and make a living.
The slogan of a leading cell phone brand, ‘Stay Connected’ is not an option, but a compulsion. It is the machine which has decided for us, decided that we can’t do without it. How it is turning us all into asocial beings — into an atomised aggregation of worker bees — is another story altogether. But today is a good day to ponder these questions. Happy World Telecommunication Day.
sampath@dnaindia.net
