Ever wondered how your best friend broke up few weeks back with her Prince Charming and stated the cause being ignorance on his part? Ever noticed how paranoid you tend to feel when you trying reaching that one person and you cannot get through their line? Ever thought how your assignments end up being incomplete because you are busy gossiping with your buddy about how cool your crush looks? Ever pondered how updating your Facebook status and tweeting becomes an urgent need while you are on the move? Ahh! The parents usually blame our generation for our compulsive ways but, in reality, it’s the technological advancement and how easily accessible these means have become to us is what is contributing to such circumstances.
I mean why don’t we look back a few decades? There was no internet facility available at the households. Cellular phones were alien objects. Social networking was something unimaginable for everybody. That was the era of letters. And, guys! If you feel, there was no romance then, you are absolutely mistaken. The hearts were connected and defintiely the bonds were stronger than they are today. The reason the couples panic today is mostly because he or she didn’t reply to my SMS. He or she didn’t pick up my call. There’s a lack of understanding and this is all thanks to the technological progress. WITH EVERY SMS going unanswered, with every call going unattended, the sense of betrayal deepens. People have stopped connecting via hearts. It’s all so technical. So, scientific development ought to be blamed for the rapid rise in the number of break ups.
Now, let us take the case of over protectiveness. Didn’t trains run late a few decades back? Was there never any sort of water logging during the monsoons? Was there never any urgent work coming up in the offices which demanded for more number of hours from the employees? People would never go crazy because of these reasons then. But, today, the scenario is completely different. Almost every teenager has a cell phone as they reach home. This is because the parents cannot imagine that the batteries can ever get exhausted and they tend to think all the negative consequences for the child reaching home late. Was there never a day during the eighties and the nineties when the child reached home late? The parents would never shoot questions like bullets at them regarding their whereabouts but, today this does happen and again technology is to be blamed for this.
The last and the most important consequence is the Space. Today, every individual feels the need for space and space for them means an escape to the virtual world. A child returns from school and instead of talking to his parents, he would rather sit in front of the PC chatting with strangers, who indeed appear to be friendly, but who knows the ultimate motive? A working woman comes home after a hard day at office and instead of spending some quiet hours with her better half, wishes to gets her own space and to think of a new Facebook status.
If technology creates space for all of us this way, then that day is not too far when there will be nothing at all but space amidst the individuals staying under the same roof. More than connecting people, today technology is distancing them with the real world and in a way, giving rise to insecurities where the level of understanding is evaporating and soon might even vanish without leaving a trace.
– Arundhati Chatterjee –
