Trouble in Cyberia

How do you tell if you are addicted to the Internet, asks a yuppie in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. If you don't know the gender of y...

How do you tell if you are addicted to the Internet, asks a yuppie in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. If you don8217;t know the gender of your three best friends, guffaws a dinner companion. Everyone8217;s favourite chronicler of thirtysomething female angst may roll her eyes at such quips, but there is no denying that this decade at an end has changed the way the world bonds, and communicates. As the changes wrought during the decade are notched up, nothing can quite equal the socio-cultural impact of the Internet. But if just five years ago, the information revolution was hailed as an unadulterated boon, the perspective offered at the end of the nineties is somewhat more mixed.

Why, it8217;s taken just months for enthusiasts to indulge in a sober rethink. If just a year ago Thomas L. Friedman was basking in the bestseller lists with The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his eulogy to the merits of globalisation propelled by cheaper, faster, smaller telecommunication technology, a few months later he was ruing the darkeffects of over-connectedness, of the invasion of privacy they facilitated.

The pleasures of a wired world cannot be denied. The hours and funds saved on account of e-mail have been the subject of mindboggling estimates, as have the wealth of information placed just a mouse click away on the Internet along with convenient and innovative shopping and entertainment options. Gadgetry and benefits offered in the workplace aside, e-mails have engendered new communities and strengthened old bonds. In the process, they have also spawned a linguistic dialect, splattered with acronyms, abbreviations and grammatical uniqueness. Short attention spans were always going to be a fallout of the Net revolution, and these millions of missives that whizz around the globe daily are characterised by brevity. Indeed, given the ever present imperative to let everyone near and far know that all8217;s well, chain letters, which require just a few seconds to click on the forward command, swirl around the globe, always forwarded, rarelyread.

The benefits of speed and convenience have, however, been accompanied by assaults on privacy. For instance, when writers like Vikram Seth declare that their computers are not connected out of fear that viruses may destroy their creative labour, little do they realise that in the process they are also ensuring that novels in progress are not stolen. Websites visited during innocuous surfing expeditions could give geeks access to all your personal files.

Besides, the swiftness with which mail is despatched tends to blur the fact that e-mails written in haste never really disappear and could come back and haunt their author years later, as Bill Gates found out. And the fact that all electronic mail can be monitored is often forgotten amidst the anonymity the Net seems to offer, as two dozen newspaper employees found to their horror in New York when they were fired for spending time on their personal communication. Is this then a note of despair for effortless communication? Not at all. It is just aveiled prayer for the innovations the coming years will no doubt offer, like e-mail that automatically self-destructs after being read, for a way to prevent one8217;s online behaviour from being monitored.