I am constantly bombarded by noise. Texts, Videos, Links, SMS, Calls, Chats plus a host of Apps. Some are OK, but a lot are simply noise adding to the mental harassment.
I do not know if you all feel this, but I do. Every day, Every moment.
It was not like this when I was in school. That was in the 80s.
I had few friends. Quite close we were. We used to play all the time, read books from the local library, swim in a river, play Table Tennis and of course a lot of Cricket.
School and then my Engineering also. Quite silent. No Facebook and WhatsApp, No mobile, no email. Spend time with friends, code in the lab, read in the library, watch movies.
Same continued at work. I was fixing kernel panics and coding drivers for a Unix flavour. So we used to use ‘chat’ on the VT100s on command line with fellow workers. We used emails quite a lot among us. The world was yet to wake up to Hotmail and the like. FB was out of sight and so was Google and so was the internet browsing at large.
Then there was this explosion like a big bang in the late nineties and accelerated crazily through the dawn of the millennium.
I was deep into Telecom, protocol stacks and moving up the system ladder into the world of applications, building crude versions of WhatsApp and Angry birds on the earliest of the smart phones. We were all wondering what the killer app would be only to realise later that it is not going to be one, but many.
Now 2015 and I am surrounded by tons of noise.
Not everything is added by others. I go voluntarily and hang out. Earlier this was a calm period for my brain or some void. Now it is filled with noisy bytes.
And I am sure this is going to increase enormously as we go along.
The best part of one’s life is when your time is channelized to the right things on hindsight.
This is easy to say, but highly difficult even without the digital noise.
With internet, it is a humongous task.
Everything has its negative. The greatest invention of humans has its negative in completely losing ourselves. Our time.
Machines have already triumphed over Mankind.
I feel there will be few people awake out there.
But I do have some hope. We created this. We can wriggle out of it as well. Somehow.
