A DIGITAL MIGRATION

I still remember when I first encountered the Internet, via a dial-up router that took twenty minutes to start up and connect. This was a world before Google and Facebook, when search engines didn’t exist and the only social media were chat rooms and something called Orkut that made me feel as exposed and vulnerable as walking alone into unknown territory. There were no mobile phones, smart or otherwise and no laptops. Everything was on a lumpy desktop computer, which most of us shared between our families and friends. Our time online had to be negotiated and monitored due to the high expense of landline phone connections and the need to keep the shared telephone free and available.

As exciting as it seemed then, it never occurred to me to want more. I think we were all more easily satisfied then.

Over time, I discovered the use of the Internet for research on my college assignments and learned how to navigate the early search engines with carefully constructed search phrases. I don’t think I thought they could be any better. They were already so much faster than scouring through a huge library of books through reference catalogues. And I was proud of my developing search skills.

Then Google and Facebook came. By then I was working in an advertising agency. We worked on desktop computers in offices and had clunky mobile phones we used sparingly, more like security blankets than communication devices. The Internet lived at the office since none of us could afford the required speed for those data connections. Some of us even went in to work on weekends to check our Facebook pages and some of us felt it was a good enough motivation for any extra work we were assigned. I remember my friends complaining about their restricted access and feeling happy that an advertising agency couldn’t restrict the Internet if they wanted us to learn more about consumer behaviour. 

I don’t remember wanting to bring the Internet home. It was a relief to be back in my room at the end of the day, with the office emails far away. I had a TV and so many books I could escape into. I even had a quirk that made me take long detours to avoid crossing my office building on holidays and weekends that I wasn’t working. I didn’t need any reminders of what might be awaiting me on a manic Monday morning.

The free weekends were lazy late mornings that stretched into drowsy afternoons and evenings. We got excited about seemingly scarce things like picnics, concerts and matches, building up the anticipation of meeting friends who were visiting from other cities and going out with the family once a week. We used to get bored, a feeling that seems to have become extinct. 

The smartphone and laptop arrived in India as a corporate tool, a perk I was given with a promotion and one I was not too happy about. A Blackberry had only one advantage over a regular phone and that was access to office emails. I knew this wasn’t so I could leave the office early and still respond to emails. The Blackberry was to ensure that my work followed me wherever I went. Now there would be no excuse and no escape. I learned I had to put it away in a drawer if I wanted to sleep uninterrupted through the night. 

The quick multiplication of social media added the elements of entertainment and socialising to the digital world. Newer smartphones developed with so many user-friendly apps. Then e-commerce arrived and we tentatively dipped our toes in, as we worried about all the ways it might let us down or drown. I was a reluctant early adopter – not jumping in because I was wary for myself but coaxing myself forward for the sake of my profession. Once the early hurdles were cleared, the convenience of the digital world was addictive. I enthusiastically took to net banking when it saved me from bureaucratic processes and timelines. 

We still had a distinction we drew between offline and online. Though almost everything offline had a corresponding digital avatar, we still clung to what we called the ‘real’ world.

The Covid pandemic has pushed us into a mass digital migration much as wars and famine in the past have led to migrations to other geographies. Only this time the new world we find ourselves in is already familiar to us. We have had to disregard the barriers of privacy, data security and trust now that physical safety is at so much risk offline. Virtual interactions are safer so we cling to technology, even if some of us still feel uncomfortable with it. 

Most of our focus has been on working from home with a laptop with a web camera or even just a tablet or smartphone. We worry that work has moved firmly into the home space but we don’t realise that the truth is that we have moved more completely into the digital world. 

Almost anything we do now is through the Internet. News, entertainment, shopping, payments, financial transactions, interacting with friends, networking, family events on Zoom, teaching, learning, exercising, even our quintessentially Indian time pass.  

Our lives are now more digital than physical and as this second wave rises up, they will only become more so. 

Whenever this pandemic ends, what will be left of our ties to the offline world? Will we visit it, taking digital vacations to return nostalgically to an obsolete world we once knew and loved? Or will we be so firmly entrenched in the digital space that we won’t want to switch off or even know how to?

THE PANDEMIC PARADOX

This post comes exactly two years after I published my last one. It seems we have swung from one extreme to another in this time.

Our world is becoming smaller and flatter as the virus threat, its impact on our lives and work, the response and the tools we use to adapt to it are similar across countries. The gap between countries, rich and poor, is shrinking, as are our options in dealing with the pandemic. 

Where once we clamoured for our freedom from authority, now we look to the same authority figures to protect us by locking it down. 

Our homes have become our hubs and we are deeply entrenched in technology. Work and life have merged in confusing and confounding ways. We are now dependent on our smart phones for most of our basic requirements. 

The pandemic has forced a re-evaluation of our priorities and given us a chance to identify and edit out the unnecessary. It feels like we can make our lives simpler and cosier if we choose. Not just on social media, but in the reality behind the camera. 

We are using video calling apps to create intimacy in those relationships where we have physical distance and are perhaps testing the endurance of those where we don’t. 

Cabin fever has set in and we are yearning for a return to ‘normal’. But, what is this imaginary destination that we all seem to want? Normal is something no one has experienced truly. It is a fleeting childhood from idyllic memory, a momentary dream or an impossible ambition. We’ll know it when we get there, we think, but will we be able to hold on to it even if we do? 

Life has always been and will continue to be a constant flux, where we seek to find our balance on the shifting surface. 

Context matters and how we understand and react to it determines the consequence. Judgements, however, can only be made with hindsight. So we may be able to judge the generations who came before us but we cannot judge ourselves. Later generations may decide if we did the right or wrong things in coping with the Covid pandemic. It is impossible for us to know, even as we struggle to find the right answers and actions in our small, everyday decisions. 

Our discomfort with this uncertainty has increased our political polarisation to the point that our affiliation determines what we think we know about the virus, how we react to the pandemic and even which, if any, vaccines we will put our trust in. 

Some of our biggest differences, of income class and gender, are widening the gaps we tried so hard to fill. Women are the majority of job losers as employers rush to cut costs and they are the ones most quickly absorbed in the quicksand of home and family responsibilities. 

It is the more protected and privileged of us who are paranoid about the virus. We insist on face-masks, hand sanitisers, temperature checks and social distancing. Perhaps, we feel we have more to lose from Covid and yet, we are the most likely survivors, given our financial safety nets and medical access. 

The economically disadvantaged need to get back to work. They will wear face-masks if we tell them to but they will never feel our desperation over the risks. The risks they have been facing all along were never any less dangerous. They are as likely to suffer the same mortality and economic stress from the treatable tuberculosis or even a more common infection. Dying from hunger versus dying from the virus is not much of a choice. 

We would like the economy to open up so we can enjoy the lifestyle luxuries we have had to put on hold. We would like the vaccines to be fool proof so we can rid ourselves of the constant worry. We would like the virus to disappear so we can be free from the constraints we are living with. 

The uncertainty remains. We do not yet have a starring role in the big picture of what is to come, but we can play our small bit parts and hope for the best, as have the generations before us in good times and bad.