Our Online Existence...

Have u ever thought about ur online existence ?How long have you lived in the wires & just how much have you contributed to it after-all ?But we all would surely agree that the so called wires have been at our disposal right from the time we have befriended them .The Internet has casted its magical spell upon all of us .Believe it or not, our existence in the cyber world hardly matters to the online inhabitants, but we have, for sure, become more & more dependent on this world .Can the tables turn? Could the cyber world ever value our existence too?

Well the answers aren’t too difficult to find out .A little bit of knowledge about the Internet would tell us that it is nothing without the generous co-operation & precise co-ordination of both big & small organizations and numerous individuals .Now we all know that these groups or the individuals are simple mortals like us. The difference though lies in the fact that we are here to milk the system while they prefer to nurture the system while milking it .The perception of online existence in the general netizen’s mind is to maintain a couple of e-mail IDs, a dedicated chat ID ,some accounts in some of his/her favourite sites & a good knowledge of some search engines which could rescue him at the time of distress .Just by forwarding a series of stupid SPAMs, sending e-mails & chatting online we consider ourselves to be great internet-surfers .Yes! By all these stuff we are just surfers & most of the time, are pretty satisfied with this title.

But what really appeals me is the tremendous scope to reach out to the entire world through this wonderful medium called the Internet. Unleashing your creativity to a boundary-less world which benefits from ur work & also appreciates it at the same time, got to be a sure temptation. Then why do we not try & do that more often? In India there are of course a few valid reasons why we can’t contribute .The most common reason being the comparatively high cost of domestic internet connection, to add to it there are the bandwidth constraints which does little help to the cause. Where even downloading a few MBs of data is a painful exercise, uploading something for public use seems to be a foolish bet. But more than any of the above reasons there’s one main thing that prevents the Indians from contributing to the online fraternity & that’s their lack of urge to do so.

The general mindset of the net users in India is to get the max benefit from the system forgetting entirely the mutual side of it. There’s absolutely no harm in it as far as we are myopic, but in the long run its going to be a great loss as very soon the internet revolution would be at its zenith & then it would be too late to catch up. The more matured netizens would not appreciate such an approach & it just may be, that one day several of the ways to benefit from the internet would be limited to only those, who are mutually committed to the system. Seems a rare possibility from now but in this competitive world you must dish out something to gain something & there’s nothing wrong in it. So very obviously, what seems a rarity today can be a humdrum tomorrow.

There’s absolutely no doubt that the Indians are surely some of the quickest of learners & sooner than later should realize their online responsibilities so as to grow up in terms of their internet commitments .The question is how long we take to adopt to this culture to the fullest. The time has come to make our online existence felt .The sooner we adapt, the better for us.

I’d have liked to write some more on the topic but maybe some other time & then I would speak more from a global point of view than just from the Indian side. But before that, looking for ur comments……..

Signing off,
Suvra