From One Computer to Another: Shubh Diwali, Eid Mubarak etc...

Note: This post has been published in Blogbharti.
A Dumbed-down Deepavali?

This holiday season, I shall not talk of the significance- the multiplicity of meanings- of religious festivals for our times, ‘when the globe has shrunk to about the size of a grapefruit’, or even the symbolism of ‘the happy coincidence’- it’s not every year that Diwali and Id are celebrated one day after the other- as a Divine Call to strengthen interfaith harmony against teeming mutual suspicions and xenophobias. I will instead deliberate briefly on the role of communications technology in transforming interpersonal relationships during festivals: put simply, I will look at the way the Internet- emails, instant messages (IMs)- and SMSs have changed the way we ‘greet’ each other.

Unhappily enough, I’ve been in bed: the consequence of a viral epidemic. Hence my capacity to respond to the countless emails, SMSs, scraps and messages I’ve received has become rather limited. As always, technology, the contemporary Super Man, comes to the rescue: all I’ve to do is type this down, and with a click of a button, everybody who I’ve ever known is blissfully reading this, soaking in the warmth of my good wishes- or not. This is where I’m wrong: the chances that anyone of my recipients will actually read all the way down to this is, for lack of a better word, zilch. I console myself: after all, it’s the gesture- the sentiment- that counts. They will at least know that I responded, if not how precisely I did so.

Three trends can be discerned from what I’ve just described. First, ‘content of communication’ has become secondary to the ‘act of communicating’ itself. We don’t read because we pretty much know in advance, even before the SMS icon flashes on the mobile screen, what to expect. It’s got nothing to do with empathy or even telepathy. The messages, they’re all the same. This brings me to the second point: much as I hate to use the expression, the commonality of content- the way one man’s received message becomes another's forwarded message, forming ‘message-chains’ long enough to cover the distance from here to that recently discovered but still unnamed planet beyond Pluto (in some cases, we don’t bother to alter the sender’s name from the plagiarized text-body)- is reflective of a collective ‘dumbing down’. Quantity, as we all know, cannot be a substitute for Quality.

Last and most troubling, I’m compelled to ask: has digital technology replaced personal obligation? Look at it this way, I might just be dead inside my bed, but my computer- that sweet, super-intelligent entity happily humming away on my desktop- will not fail in its duty to send you this, just as your computer or mobile will not fail in its duty to shoot off an instant reply. Machines greeting each other? Is this what our festivals have dumbed down to?

With that thought, I wish you Happy Holidays!

AJ