Two years to the dawn of a new century
that witnessed the anxiety of being able to boot up your home PC at the turn of
the century, also saw among other things the extinction of the wisdom of many a
grandmas across households, the extinction of the reference sections in
libraries, the extinction of Mr. / Ms. Know it all’s in the class rooms, in
short the extinction of the beautiful world of memory.
It also marked the birth of the high bandwidth know it all’s,
the virtual gurus, the tell- me-all friend,and the dump-your-memory friend.
Overnight one was enlightened about the what’s, why’s, when’s,
which’s, how’s of the happenings around us. We were the so called empowered
society when a toddler all of 2 hand held us to the world of information
overload at the turn of the century and at a click.
A generation that grew up being told that Knowledge was
Power was elbowed out by a generation that claimed Information is Power as long
as the electrical power and connectivity existed. There is a world of
difference between knowledge and information. Sadly the speed at which information was disseminated
was more important than the quality of the information that was being spread.
The advancements in hardware kept pace and ensured they facilitated
uninterrupted dissemination of ‘uncontrolled’ information.
All this happened because one Sergey a Russian and Larry an
American decided that they would bid adieu to the cold war, their countries
were at and give democracy a new twist and empower mankind with information. Democracy sadly gave freedom to everything
except the right to uncontrolled information. Uncontrolled information sounded nice but when
the source of uncontrolled information passed its early life entered adolescence
and crossed over to the teens, now out of the teens realized uncontrolled information
was irresponsible information too.
As we suffer from various health hazards associated with poor
lifestyle and eating habits as a result of our consumption patterns we also
suffer from an acute information obesity / disorder due to the consumption of junk,
so called intellect influencing steroids like misinformation, disinformation
and mal-information that are so beautifully camouflaged under empowerment or
right to information.
The facilitator of all this, turns twenty today, and hope
they leave the teeny tantrums behind and focus on a more responsible
dissemination of information. The brand became a verb before they reached the
responsible 20’s and hope they remain a responsible mental verb.
The need of the hour is a mature and responsible GOOGLE. We
need exponential efforts in 100’s as the name suggests, to help foster a
responsible society.
Many Happy returns of the day Google… thank you for
returning all our queries till date.
