Opinion BUG mania

B=bad: Disturbs privacy. Earlier,you’d handle landline calls adroitly. If your father received the call and suspected hanky-panky,the situation would roller-coaster into family chaos. The mobile phone has changed the privacy code. Is prostitution declining? No longer do hookers saunter the streets petulantly,obliquely keeping tabs at male movements behind them. Actually escort agencies have taken over,escort solicitations now secretly land on your handset,emails or print advertisements.

Grandmothers have lost happy moments of narrating fairy tales. On a click,the net takes children to unimaginable wonderlands,pornographic sites and violence videos. Does that make technology bad? Remote controlling their lives,tech-born kids visit virtual farms,clean animal pens,feed goats everyday. They start blogs for their pet dogs,exchange cyber conversations with other dogs. They multi-task on the computer,take no phone calls they don’t recognise,send endless text messages. If they write,they expect automatic digital correction because,“Is spelling more important or expression?” Is social networking bad for making us unsocial,giving us access to exploitation through pictures,negative propaganda?

Should the terminology for “adult at 18 years” be changed? With Freud’s Oedipus and Electra psychological complexes at the back of their minds,and hands gripping mobile phones,hide-and-seek about sex may have misplaced relevance for children. Indian adults want to ignore the impact of sex on 12-year-old children upwards. This is not to criticise digitalisation ruling our lives,but its analysis is not black or white.

U=ugly: Revolting political mudslinging on our liberalised electronic airwaves. The public is fed up with political debates with no code of conduct or ethics,screeching fights where nobody can understand anything. Take another technology-enabled ugly scene,the MMS,disclosing sexual intimacy between lovers. Cuckolded men often take secret revenge on the woman by circulating such an MMS. When a TV channel encourages people to send videos by MMS of their instant newsy experiences for telecast,it uses such material to raise the channel’s TRP. But does it not also excite people to fabricate anti-social horrors?

Insensitivity can be ugly,like a minister’s tweet on travelling cattle-class. Perhaps a playful aside of upper class arrogance,it exposed how condescendingly politicians treat their under-privileged electorate. It also exposed Twitter’s online power of disruption. Another “U” bug is haggling to buy sportsmen. “It’s not cricket” was an expression understood to mean unfair practice. India’s IPL 20/20 has blown the lid off such sophisticated aspects of cricket. Reigning today is the mentality similar to commercial transactions with slaves,animals or women in ancient Middle Eastern bazaars. So Shah Rukh Khan has every right to invest in an appropriate player-purchase,but Kolkatans went crazy that their star item for sale fetched zilch. When that’s shown on TV,weren’t they devaluing their hero instead?

G=good: Digitalisation has widened society’s mind-sphere. Sitting anywhere you can interface anything virtually,yet be personalised. It’s particularly thrilling when,after 40 years,you suddenly discover through internet social networking,a childhood woman friend whose face and name has changed after marriage. Ranjeet and Bonita subscribe to a matrimonial website to satisfy parents,but actually they use it to find dating partners. Aside from aiding romance,technology enhances careers too. Comfort and convenience are good in digitalisation. It’s so easy to complain service deficiencies and get instant response,create awareness on critical issues,generate mass following for Save Tigers,Help Girl Child,or buy movie tickets. Twenty years down the line you’ll only have Kindles or iPads,no physical book library at home,the way vinyl records vanished,and cassettes,CDs fast disappearing. Digitalisation enables global peace and harmony,people of all religions text each other on festivals. The banyan tree took hundreds of years to download its roots,but within nano-seconds the Internet creates a human banyan tree.

Digital technology established BUG mania,where bad,ugly and good aspects happen simultaneously. Today’s below-30 Zap generation absorbs and enjoys this incomparable BUG trend,but older generations segregate the bad,ugly and good. That’s where the chasm invisibly bites,like the bedbug,resulting in attrition at work,switching off from talking to parents at home. If you can cuddle into contemporary lifestyle and thinking,embrace BUG mania to feel young again,you may enlarge business too like L’Oreal did.

About 40 years ago when civilised society found Punks undesirable,L’Oreal took inspiration from Punks and created hair gel and colour to drive the fashion revolution and make big business.

Shombit Sengupta is an international Creative Business Strategy consultant to top management. Reach him at http://www.shiningconsulting.com