E-Prophecies

Life could get so much easier had it been like Gtalk wherein you could take a while to think, during which you could always pretend to be doing something ‘important’ after which you would be shown ‘typing’ your message across. Imagine if you could just erase what you shouldn’t have said to someone you care about and then replace it with something more carefully thought out. However, instead of trying to make our real lives electronic-ised by internet influence; we, the human race are evolving more to make our e-lives as real as possible.

We started out with e-mails, Video Conferencing, and finally, Instant Messaging, most popularly on Gtalk. Now the latest buzz and the in thing is Google Wave. Yes, Google is omnipresent. I wiki-ed it up (finally, something that is NOT Google!) and this is what I found:


Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.


Like Meg elaborates in simple words for my simple mind, this essentially means that as and when you type the words they will appear on your friend’s screen. Real live time chatting. No chance to delete the “Ohh…I’m sorry!” to replace it by “It's ok dude!” to sound cool. I wonder if it’s still a long time before we invent something that could capture senses of smell, taste and touch in digital form. Imagine you are head-banging in a Shankar- Ehsaan-Loy prof show and you capture everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, in your device (whatever it shall be called). Years later, you relive the experience. You are chilling out in a coffee house near your work place with office friends. You switch it on and out there you are back to the same place you were on 31st October 2009. The same temperature, the same smell, the same mid-winter air just wafting out from the device and making you feel like a college brat again.

Such a device if made must come at a cost. One must not be allowed to use it more than a specified number of times. The whole point of our existence would become insignificant. We could wind up living in the future during most part of our life and then again, after a while, live in the past. It could be disastrous. Blasphemous.

Not that this day is to come anywhere in the near future (though I would like to live to see it), but my point is that the world is changing. Technology and the Internet are probably more powerful than how we understand it today. It’s changing everything around you. It’s changing itself while you’re not looking. It started with Orkut, and then came Facebook; people went scattering around both for a while; now, Twitter. Blogspot, Wordpress, also the perpetual Google-Microsoft battle. It started out with MSN Messeger, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk and now Google Wave. I’m tired of catching up. I am not on Twitter. Yes, people still give me the raised eyebrow as if I have broken a pious unspoken rule followed by this Internet devout generation of mine.