By
Preeti Gupta – Student
Mentor-Ms. Preeti Agarwal
Satyam College of Education, Noida
“Technology will destroy this planet mentally, if responsible individuals do not come forward to advocate for responsible use of technology.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gospel of Technology
Recently, I read an editorial article in a spiritual magazine[1], which compelled me to ponder upon an issue. Referring to the statistics given by ‘Central news agency- the largest magazine distribution agency in India,’ this editorial began with an issue that Book publishers are not getting enough business because people prefer to read on digital mediums rather than the printed material.
Perfectly fine- It does not seem to be an issue for me because I agree that preferences do change with the evolution, so I continued gazing a few more lines.
The next few lines were eye-opening, revealing that only 14 % of literate people read topics of their interests using all mediums (Digital and Print), while half of them only read the newspaper.
I was utterly bewildered to digest this piece of information (I am sure the Editor must have been equally surprised while writing this fact) that 86% are NOT reading at all, neither through digital nor through the print mediums.
How surprising is this to know that in this technological era, when ‘knowledge’ is the new weapon and ‘data’ is the new currency, people do not have time to read.
The sole purpose of Technology was conceived to simplify the mundane struggle of human’s life, and save time to allow pursuing one’s dream of making this world all that more beautiful through self-realization.
But, alas!!!, people don’t have time. Ideally, it should have been a reversed situation, where more and more people were expected to do real things, fulfilling their purposes of being here, on this planet, dying peacefully with satisfaction that they made the world slightly more beautiful with their own contributions.
I thought, probably, Technology has subsumed its benefits. Moreover, its use is contagious, whether it is a production line in the industry or people using social media. Because there are producers, they require consumers also.
Now, I had started thinking of this issue from a much broader perspective, which reminded me of a famous commentary of Srila Prabhupada[2] in one of his discourses on one shloka of Gita,
“Janma-mrtyu-jara-vyadhi duhkha-dosanudarsanam.”
He said, janma (Body shall take birth again), mrtyu (Body shall die), jara (Body shall become old), vyadhi (Body shall become diseased) are the four clutches; instead, these are the only problems of the humankind.
This prophecy drove me to rethink the increasing use of Technology from a different viewpoint; after all, only social requirements cause all developments to happen.
Is this the case that since humans could not solve these actual four problems, they have started creating hypothetical problems, and using Technology as an instrument to solve them?
It seems to be convincing to me now that how the development of an aggregator (of information) has become a new mantra and success guarantee for the business start-ups. Are they trying to solve actual problems, indeed?
Google, Ola, Uber, Amazon, etc., among countless others, are the prominent examples of aggregators having the capability to influence major decisions of the world leaders, many of them are having more net worth than the GDP of few countries. What is the reason? Why information disseminators have become more powerful than those, who are actually creating it.
Human’s quest to seek answers has always been prevalent since evolution, including the seminal one, “Who am I.” Now, this has been augmented with the need to getting quick answers.
Now, it is not the ‘information’ only, but getting ‘instantaneous information’ is driving most of the technological innovations. To what extent can it be viewed as ‘optimization’ could be an issue of future debates?
Therefore, I speculate that this sense of urgency (or emergency) must have revolutionized the data analytics field, which otherwise used to be a topic of discussion for researchers in the mathematics field.
Maintaining continuity with my thought pattern, I searched for the origin of the information technology giant, Google, on Google, and found ‘Page Rank’ as the base algorithm (procedure) behind presenting filtered information from a plethora of documents on the World Wide Web, which were already present. Other disruptive technological inventions have shown similar backgrounds; most of them were the outcomes of the young mind’s imaginations and efforts, that too in the early years of their undergraduate studies, including the invention of “internet” itself.
To my surprise, because of the extensive growth of the Internet (user base is annually doubling in size), companies have extensively invested in maintaining robust server infrastructure (data centers), which requires increased processing (and processing requires ‘electricity’) for faster network speed and larger storage space.
Data centers have become a latent threat to the environment in the fight against climate change. In 2016[3], all the data centers in the world used more than Britain’s total electricity consumption.
Now, it became difficult for me to understand the kind of actual problems, Technology is trying to solve or is this just a mirage to have developed ‘optimal’ solutions to the not-so-real issues?.
A quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb put things into perspective
“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.”
Most of the employees spend 28% of their working time in dealing with interruptions from social media, 43 % percent of the users find the use of smartphones stressful because of the constant need of checking messages[4]. This situation is likely to worsen in the coming years, especially for working professionals because of the availability of instant messengers (IMs). As is evident that many small or mid-level organizations (including educational institutions) extensively use the ‘Grouping’ feature available in social media tools, like WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Telegram, etc.
By taking an educational set up as a case study, Groups are often formed for interaction among the teachers or in between teachers and students, for quick information dissemination and collection. Surprisingly, these groups have gradually become de-facto for carrying out management and administration related activities.
This issue of urgency in getting information and feeling ‘in-control’ found to be an extensively researched area, focusing on the IT-induced stress, overload, and impacting work-life balance.
Since most of the IT-related legislations are not strictly dealt with (or at least not implemented in ‘True spirit’) in developing nations, organizations may opt for self-regulation to curb negative or unintended consequences of IT overuse. For students’ viewpoint also, Del Siegle has correctly pointed out in his paper, ‘The Dark Side of Using Technology,’ that gifted children get an opportunity to express their creativity through Technology. Still, parents and educators must guide them to avoid its negative consequences.
In light of sufficient evidence of having an association between excessive screen time and its impact on physiological, psychological, and social life, concrete steps must be taken to prevent an addiction to connectivity.
Few ‘ideas’ have changed the lives of more than seven billion people on this planet, this sound in consonance to the famous quote “No army can withstand the force of an idea whose time has come.”
Probably the idea to give more time to a human’s ‘life’ on the planet earth has come…