Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Who pays when everything is for free!

The awe of network technology is overwhelming as it showers a variety of freebies, so much so that we wonder why stuff like music and movies were priced in the past. Such freebies come on account of us donating vital information and surrendering our privacy - like our interest, buying habits and cyber movements - that has created an economy in the hands of those who 'own the fastest computers with access to everyone's information'.

Little does anyone care because false hope is spread that the emerging information economy will benefit those who provide the information that drives it? If this were so, some 140,000 people employed with Kodak would not have lost their job when Instagram had acquired it; and Facebook would not have rested those 13 employees who made Instagram worth a billion dollars before buying it. Where did all those jobs disappear to and what happened to the middle-class wealth that was created? Haven’t we been witness to recession and unemployment instead!

Digital visionary and philosopher Jaron Lanier argues that we have been psychologically victimized by technologies that we 'have chosen to adopt'. But has there been much choice? Internet technologies promote the strength of democratized wisdom at the cost of killing individual voice and intellectualism. What you say on the internet is converted into dehumanized data, which makes the information aggregator rich and not the one who produces the information in the first place. This is exactly the wrong set of values that Lanier has been concerned about. Having invented the term virtual reality and having been part of the Silicon Valley, Lanier emphatically questions the self-destructive nature of the information economy.

Recognized as history's 300 greatest inventors, Lanier reasons the need for shaping technology to fit culture's needs and not vice versa. He suggests the following experiment: resign from all the free online services you use for six months to see what happens. You don’t need to denounce them forever, make value judgements, or be dramatic. Just be experimental. You will probably learn more about yourself, your friends, the world, and the Internet than you would have if you never performed the experiment.' Only by leading absorbing lives, as an individual and as a part of the society, can we outgrow our addiction to technology-driven consumerism!....Link

Who owns the future?
by Jaron Lanier 
AllenLane, UK
Extent: 360, Price: £ 20

Friday, August 9, 2013

The book of change

It is a story of those incredible nine years, between 1993 and 2012, that empowered 900 million people with wireless connectivity; it is a tale of technology transfer that generated a cascade of new occupations and jobs; and it is a saga of crony capitalism that subsumed five of the ten telecom ministers on charges of corruption. It is an unfinished but absorbing fairy tale of a country coming of age, from one telephone per 165 persons in 1991 to nearly two mobile connections per person in 2012. Cell Phone Nation offers an interdisciplinary analysis on how 'boundary between impossibility and possibility' got blurred and what helped people 'attain that was long denied' to them.
The mobile phone may have provided access to global flows of knowledge and mobilized social movements but it has altered local cultural practices and challenged gender relations in a country that is not only unjust and unequal but immensely complex too. Yet, for every increase of 10 per cent in mobile penetration the State Domestic Product reportedly grows by 1.2 per cent. Mobile phone has become an empowering tool in the hands of millions of Indians who otherwise may not have been part of an accelerating economy.
While providing a comprehensive account of how mobile phones have changed lives, authors Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron do not lose sight of the likely health and ecological implications of radiation emitting mobile towers which have mushroomed across the country's vast landscape. Curiously, the impact of mobile towers on survival of house sparrows and honey bees is anything but shocking. Future generation may have to pay a price for the telecom revolution (and its leftover e-waste) currently underway in the country.
Despite its flip side, mobile phone has been a great equalizer in a country beset with caste and class disparities. But will it alter the well-entrenched hierarchy prevailing in the society or can it surmount physical barriers to transform the power structure? Or, will the power of cheaper mobiles only be used to make sexual harassment and economic crimes easier? The authors raise such compelling questions in a racey narrative that is lucid, edifying and engrossing....Link
Cell Phone Nation 
by Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron 
Hachette India, New Delhi
293 pages, Rs. 499.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

There can only be one winner!

Farmer suicides have become such commonplace in India that if Salim-Javed were to script the 1975 blockbuster Sholay today they could skip the explanatory dialogue on suicide 'angrej log jab marte hain, toh usse suicide kehte hain' (when foreigners die it is termed suicide). Successive crop failures and the burden of debt have forced thousands of farmers to consume their lives. Just change the name and the place, the script can hold on to its own.

Sudhakar Bhadra kills himself under similar circumstances. The powerful district committee of Mityala routinely dismisses the suicide and refuses compensation to his widow. Gangiri, his brother, makes it his life's mission to bring justice to the dead by influencing the committee to validate similar farmer suicides. Gangiri's struggle for justice treads through unequal turf. 'It is an unequal fight, but we have the dead on our side.'

Using a familiar plot, Kota Neelima scripts a gripping tale wherein political capital is made out of a social misery. For the political class, farmers are worth the electoral ritual wherein promises are made, but not to be kept. Even political attention following farmers' suicide doesn't last long. No surprise, battlelines get drawn as the protagonist battles for justice against the arrogant politician who fights to hold onto his seat of power, a family legacy. And as is in every battle, there can only be one winner! No rewards for guessing the loser.

While nature has its own way of taming great forces of change, by containing them in mundane characters, destiny waits to choose its villains and victims among the warriors. A victory at times may turn out to be facile for the winner but could easily help the loser climb a moral high ground from where it pricks conscience of the masses. 

Shoes of the Dead is an act of fiction, though not far from real life, which portrays the grim realities confronting the farming communities. It is a story that ought to be told every so often to stir the social and political conscience of people....Link

Shoes of the Dead
by Kota Neelima 
Genre: Fiction
Rainlight/Rupa, New Delhi
274 pages, Rs.495