Tag: CUSAT

  • Ex-communities

    One of the pleasant side-effects of the pandemic in Bangalore is the (relative) reduction in time to get to places. That meant I didn’t grumble much when we had to make a trip to Jalahalli. The original plan was to use the Metro but thanks to the reduced time, we took a cab. Typical tourist behaviour! (For Whitefield residents, Jalahalli is practically tourism)

    Our destination was somewhere inside the HMT kingdom and on our way back, as the sun began its descent, the backseat of a car was a great place to reflect on folks spending their Sunday evening. Using HMT and time together is predictably Facebook meta, but there is a poignance in the vestiges of a once thriving community. A cinema, an officers club, an auditorium, a playground, a hospital and even a museum, all centred around a factory. Someone’s vision of a self-sufficient ecosystem.

    And like all ecosystems, it has a shelf-life. But parts of it persist, and the crowd in the playground, where two cricket matches were being played simultaneously, was proof of that. It reminded me of the university campus, and a phrase I had used for it almost a decade ago – islands in time.

    I am probably biased because I am an 80s kid. Technically 70s, but hey, what’s a couple of years in a few decades? I think the ecosystems that I experienced in the 80s gave people a shared identity. And I could not help but juxtapose this with apartment life. Yes, we call it community, but how many really are?

    I also believe we have been moving relentlessly towards a more individual-centric was of living. Technology and specifically mobile internet has accelerated it. Ironically, the pandemic was a speed breaker that made us realise our shared existence in isolation, but the lesson, I pessimistically believe, won’t stick. Algorithms ensure that our digital consumption is a warped version of reality tailor-made for the individual. And when everything from food to self actualisation is a swipe away, community gets played differently.

    One shift is from real to digital. I am old enough to remember the first years of the consumer internet (in India, at least) and the online communities then. IRC, anyone? 🙂 And the early days of Web 2.0 – from Google Reader to Del.icio.us to Twitter. Yes, these ecosystems too have a shelf life. The internet has matured, and by definition, that is a loss of innocence. And likes and ‘fams’ simultaneously reveal and exacerbate the malaise within. I happened to be reading Behave, and found this paragraph relevant here –

    …neighbourhoods readily communicate culture to kids. Is there garbage everywhere? Are houses decrepit? What’s ubiquitous – bars, churches, libraries, or gun shops? Are there many parks, and are they safe to enter? Do billboards, ads and bumper stickers sell religious or material paradises, celebrate acts martyrdom, or kindness and inclusiveness?

    Look around, across real and virtual neighbourhoods, and think about what you see. Maybe it’s me, but it is indeed ironic that the era of hyper-connectivity creates an inherent sense of disconnectedness. Not just from others, but from the self too. That, is a dangerous place to be.

  • The Cybernauts

    Was reading a book a few weeks back – The Cybergypsies by Indra Sinha, which was a kind of autobiographical take on the early days of the internet, thats starting around the mid eighties. Its a tale of the early cybernauts, their addiction to the internet and how their real and virtual lives fought each other for attention and threatened to engulf each other.
    It took me back to the turn of the century, my early days online, when the net of Indra Sinha was well on its way to becoming the worldwide web it is today. It reminded me of the a/c internet cafes, visits to which were not so frequent because of the steep costs, and the dimly lit computer labs in the university which had only the unreliable vsnl connection.The days of IRC and chats with unknown angels and merlins and superboys, the arcade games, the imaginary worlds created among friends across geographies, in a way, it was almost the kind of life the early cybernauts led.
    And when you were asked what exactly you spent hours in front of a computer for, you really couldn’t explain what made it so worthwhile. The days of usa.net and eudoramail and theglobe.com, names which have bitten cyberdust quite a whileback. I still have a friend from those days, almost a decade of only virtual friendship, well, almost, since she sent me flowers for my wedding 🙂
    And then came the initial days of blogging, and friends made on rediffblogs, people whom I did not know really, but with whom i shared thoughts, and rants. And, that, i guess where virtuality started ending and reality started taking over. There were blog meets and the imaginary worlds created carefully gave way to the cafes of the real world.
    It took a turn with orkut and co, where the networks were used to get in touch with people you already knew in your real life. And these days, on twitter, i meet a few who i used to know during the rediff days, but gone are the days of anonymity, for my linkedin profile would readily tell people who i was in the real world.
    i miss those days, because there was only communication and a conversation among equals then. No virtual celebrities, no social media experts, no snobs, everything was virtual, your imagination and thoughts were the only thing that mattered, virtuality was a shell you could retreat to when the real world became too unbearable. Its different now, virtuality and reality are too enmeshed, and as with everything else in the world, behind every virtual interaction, there is a real intention. This must be Cybernauts 2.0

    until next time, really virtual