Hardwired into digital-scape

Sudhansu Mohanty

As you age, there’s this urge to silhouette ‘life lived’ with ‘life present’ — to assess changes. What’s striking today is mobile telephony. The ride on the Internet highway is so bewitching that no ancient man like me would have ever wildly dreamt of. 

How misleading is it to call this souped-up device a mobile phone! It’s protean — it connects, even without a single face-to-face — an all-in-one contraption that encapsulates life, defines living, and denotes people’s existence. Signature of living! 

Little wonder it’s numero uno among life’s devices. When in the 19th century Thomas Edison’s Hello trounced Alexander Bell’s Ahoy in common usage to gain universal currency, no one guessed this secular currency to reach yonder. It’s gotten smart, and smartened us.

In the early 1990s, the tagline ran ‘Think global, act local’. Today, mobile telephony does the opposite: ‘Stay local, act global!’ You know the world better than your surroundings,  your distant relations/friends better than your neighbours/family; you are more clued-up with things afar than your own ecosystem. You are a global person by right of information, and connect.

Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Skype, and multiple variants of Google, Instagram, widgets have enlivened life as Twitter backs up to melts things down. Facebook is gateway to sassy social huddles, preening achingly stylish photo-ops 24X7 to get applauded (no wow-less pictures in this pixel age!). 

For senior citizens, WhatsApp has substituted siesta — forwarding videos on health/vitality, recycled jokes, fake news rolling off politicos’ uber-efficient assembly lines, birthday/festive wishes architecting bespoke decals.   

The bulk is anything but tele-calls. Mercifully, it’s deftly compensated by mega tele-conversation (telecon), not the crisp tele-communication (telecom) of yore — to spook life!

Wired morning-walkers seem non-social to fellow-walkers. But they aren’t. They are in kinship with a faraway world. Scooterists’ muscles dexterously multitask — mobile clamped betwixt ear and shoulder — to sway/swerve/cleave their way through maniacal traffic. The grubby man in the aircraft conveys his secrets millimeters away from your ears. Telecon promotes market elasticity across geographies, conveying fruits and vegetables prices and prompting price sensitivity.

Social conversations are pinged midway, de-threading gossipy tattles, as listeners’ minds vacuum out to your sage words. You’d better live with these blessed nuisances. 

Don’t get me wrong. See the high net worth of mobile-phoneship: WhatsApp university tutors gratis; Google guru Wikis you to call peoples’ bluff when fast ones are pulled; messages add updates. Our lives in interconnected digital-scape irredeemably veer around OTPs for going anywhere forward — an impenetrable category for living life today! 

We live in the fog of mobility — we can’t block ourselves out. The apps flank and tail us everywhere. So what? We are connected with the world — dunia meri mutthi me! 

‘Hi there!’ callers chirp. Life’s a-changin’! Don’t feel conned, attaboy!