Tech rewind: Times and technologies have moved on... And will continue to do so

The legendary Gordon Moore is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation. But he’s popularly known for a theory he postulated rather than the impressive title he holds. Referred to as Moore’s Law, it became an industry rule to double the number of transistors on a computer chip. However, if there’s anything we need to take from this law, it is that technology is evolving at a far rapid pace. It is doubling its potential every two years.

This silicon mutation has impacted the way our generation, and the generations born after us have evolved. If you’ve followed technology for even 5 years, you’d have witnessed a drastic shift and manner in which this doubling of computing potential every couple of years has influenced human life. We’ve now got the whole world in our hands. Quite literally. Everything’s an app.

Let’s socialise Modern life, over the past decade, has compelled us to socialise. Albeit virtually. We’ve managed to turn hands-on dinners to multiple conversations across applications. Some open, some secure. We may be with a family member or a loved one, but we’d stay glued to our screens. We can’t focus anymore.

We’ve forgotten that the joys of life are in flesh and blood. In the warmth of togetherness, and meeting people. Not over being the sly stalker admiring a stranger virtually, or swiping the profile of another user before dating them.

Still single? There’s an app for that! In the yesteryears, dating advice probably went along the lines of, “if you’re single, go out there, meet someone!” The norm today isn’t about meeting someone, but relying on an algorithm. It’s like a Ouija board that through some supposedly divine ability matches mutual interests. After factoring age, preferences, orientation, hobbies, interests and such factors, the algorithm matches profiles.

Yes, people are now profiles. And the humanness has been reduced to an entry in a database. Talk about being inhuman. We’ve undoubtedly taken away the humanness from our lives. And we’ve managed to do that by bringing automation into every task of our life.

How did all of it begin? Till the 1990s, we were in order as a race. Then the internet closed in on us. Amazon.com was founded on 5 July, 1994. And since then, e-commerce and online shopping took off. It didn’t happen overnight. But over several years. The rapid progression of mobility, however, changed everything.

Five years later, in 1999, the first BlackBerry device was launched. Precisely around the year 2000, at the beginning of this century is when BlackBerry controlled the civilised lot of our generation. The greatest thing about the BlackBerry was that you were always connected. You could email, message, anyone anywhere on this planet! That’s what I mean by having the whole world in your hand!

No wonder, BlackBerrys were quickly referred to as CrackBerrys . In the true sense, we were beginning to see the influence of tech addiction. Our lives were ruled by it. Ever heard of the De Quervain syndrome? I’m sure you haven’t. It’s also known as the BlackBerry thumb, or texting thumb. I hear you go, ‘Aah! I know what that means’.

Yeah, we’ve all been there, done that! So our connected devices have ended up being our first love. Try taking away your addicted friend’s smartphone from them. You’ll soon see withdrawal symptoms such as ‘ringxiety’ and ‘fauxcellarm’ which has been documented by psychologists. It’s interesting how Scott Adams in 1996 referred to a similar condition as the phantom-pager syndrome!

We’ve moved on, but haven’t changed This is the dusk of 2015, and we’ll soon be at the break of dawn of 2016. Large players such as Nokia and BlackBerry have virtually moved away from the pole star position in the technology realm. We now have Apple, Facebook and Google who have taken this place. Over the years, technology has changed. But our obsession with it hasn’t. As a race, we’re akin to inquisitive kids excited with the rather unknown side of life. We’re happy to play and foolishly get sucked into distraction around us.

Yet we claim them to be disruptive technologies.

Groups of friends, fraternities and blind date groups have now been replaced by Facebook, Twitter, dating and matrimonial and even Tinder.

A campaign I love for the messaging around the need to communicate more often is that of Australia Post. It emphasises the need to ‘touch someone.’ And there’s no better way to touch someone by sending them a handwritten letter.

Imagine a five-year-old sending an e-greeting. Would it ever manage to have the same impact to ‘move’ a parent on her birthday? Or would a plain sheet of paper with ‘kidfont’ size 65 written in crayon in landscape mode, riddled with grammatical errors bring a smile on her face after a long tiring day?

It’s the same debate with ebook readers and print paperbacks handed over from dorm-to-dorm, and the handwritten notes scribbled on the side that weave a richer story compared to your thumb flicking through the pages. Moreover, there’s no need to charge a paperback! But coming to think of it, which one’s better? And each generation will give you a different answer.

Understanding the change we’re part of ‘Cz msgng z d bst!’ We moved beyond frowning at the lack of structure in communication to adapt to shorter crisper messages rid of vowels. Apparently vowels only add extra characters. And we’re better off without them! I’m shocked I actually did type that garbled text. But whether we like it or not, text communication has an edge over voice communication.

As a race, we tend to avoid calls, and prefer less intrusive forms of communications such as instant messengers, chat applications or even p2p solutions. In an unintended expression of ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, stickers have taken over as the means to express emotions in chat applications. That’s given rise to myriad applications that offer more descriptive and geo-culturally relevant stickers that appeal to the new generation of internet users.

If none of this makes sense, then we might just need to take a while to understand the various generations out there. To begin with, there’s the popular Baby Boomers who were born immediately after the Second World War. After decades of global turmoil and hardships, there was sudden respite with peace, tranquillity and optimism. Citizens were focussing on nation building. This was a sentiment shared by all nations. Baby Boomers are referred to as people born between 1946 and 1964.

Similarly, there is Generation X, also known as Gen X. This includes people born between 1960s and early 1980s. Effectively, these are children of those who witnessed the war. They were born in a comparatively secure and peaceful world. Today, most of them are in their active age, approximately mid-30s to mid-50s. In effect, they’re leaders in the professional space. They head teams. In all likelihood, your boss is a Generation X.

Lastly, come millennials. These are people born between the 1980s and early 2000s. So most co-founders or heads of companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Tinder to name a few. And as you’d realise, pop culture today is influenced by millenials. By nature of their temperament, millennials are more likely to take risks, compared to their seniors, the Generation X.

Conservative Baby Boomers were raised by parents who suffered the perils of war. But it was Baby Boomers who lived the true life as far as enjoying every moment and meeting new people. Travelling the countryside, and clicking pictures. Polaroid died, but culture of images stayed. Back then, the pictures would be a part of a photo album. Today they go on Facebook and Instagram. The 1970s and the 1980s have passed us by, but Instagram filters are here to stay.

Putting all this into context, your boss may not be pleased with receiving the following text message:

‘Cn I gt an off 2day snc my pet fls sad?’

Chances are the boss might even question his/her existence in this world. But two decades later, shorter and more informal modes of communication would be the norm. There is already debate over bringing communication over social media networks under the purview of the employer. It’s known that recruiters go through the social and digital footprints of a candidate even before calling them for an interview.

Eventually, personal and professional spaces tend to merge, and could finally come down to your digital identity. Probably millennial bosses would be the coolest of them all. But then, millennial bosses might even fire their employees over text messages, or worse via a sticker and a smiley. That sounds similar to break-up texts.

Governments have adapted technology Indeed the times of change are here. Governments have increasingly been held accountable. These are the days of Open Government. With Digital India gaining attention, it’s only obvious that the government will need to be accessible on the platforms its citizens are most comfortable with. We recently saw how a woman passenger on and Indian train managed to move people in the Indian Railways machinery after tweeting to the Union Railway minister.

Since the rise of short forms of communication such as tweets, government offices have begun to adapt social networking and micro blogging as means to reach out to citizens. Over the past 15 years, the United States and the developed world have stressed on the need for an open government platform. And in a couple of years, we will see the fruit of it with Indian government offices across states rendering their services to citizens online.