The Internet, The Digital Age
and Social Media is all over and ubiquitous, at least in Modern Urban Life;
everywhere you look, everywhere you turn - you can spot its presence, its
over-arching and all-pervasive influence. Virtually every news media, every conversation
on the topic of the internet - all of it focuses on its all pervasive presence
and the impossibility of staying without the internet & social media
on a personal level.
This is now getting into an
entirely new field : The Smartphone. It is increasingly thought that the power
of the smartphone can replace the old desk- and laps by a segment of thinkers;
that the smartphone can do just about everything; that it is now as essentiality;
that be it personal or professional, you cannot survive in the modern world
without the smartphone; that it is not a luxury but a felt and present need, as
essentiality.
Life put in my path a chance,
an opportunity to test both hypotheses, this all-prevalent understanding, this
universally accepted truism by virtue of a transfer to Nagpur, without my
Laptop or Desktop, at the mercy of a smartphone only till my new asset was
allocated to me by the central team. And truth be told - while at the
official level, it may pose challenges, at the personal level, I have enjoyed
it immensely, as it has exposed me, or rather reintroduced me to joys long
forgotten, methods and habits now thought dead...
On an official scale, it did
pose many challenges- not insurmountable, but still challenges. It is just not
feasible to get the same level of productivity on a smartphone as it is on a
laptop; while basic tasks can be achieved with a modicum of ease and even
convenience, complex and long tasks require the comfort of the laptop. That
said, I cannot function without a smartphone anymore - not professionally, not
anymore. Neither can I do so without a laptop - I require both.
On a personal scale - it did
not pose any challenges. There was not even one single bad point of not having
a desktop or a laptop; it was a complete waste and a completely useless
product, having no value addition. Not one personal task suffered, not one
inconvenience was caused by not having access to the desktop or the laptop. Of
course, you might comment that there was the smartphone : but hold on just a
minute...
In the past 15 days, my usage of the smartphone was minimal for my personal purposes. While on an official level, I cannot function, I just cannot function - on a personal level, much to my surprise, I found myself quite comfortable not using the smart functions of my smartphone. I minimised my presence on Whatsapp, was sparing on LinkedIn and Facebook, and so on : and I did not miss it. Let alone miss it, to my tremendous surprise, I found I quite liked it.
I chose to call my relatives in
place of Whatsapp messaging; as one example. I chose not to respond to comment
on facebook and other social media and so on. I could go on and on; but the
fact remains that on a personal level, my life suffered no major hiccups
without the smart functions. This does not mean that the smartphone is
useless; I did use it for important tasks - like ticketing, googling important
things like stores in Nagpur, locations etc
The
impact of this conscious effort at abstinence on a personal level were
learnings on professional and personal arenas; in the personal arena - many
occasions and tasks, which could have been easier with a little bit of support,
became hard in the absence not of the smartphone or the internet, but of
the absence of the proper supporting infrastructure like apps and payment
mechanisms. Not using the smart capabilities for these tasks revealed the
immaturity of the overall market and that it has still a long way to go before
being fully relevant and developed
I stopped playing games -
no
Candy Crush, no Subway Surfer - nothing. I found a lot of time for neglected
aspects like reading, which broadened into interest areas I would not have
thought of earlier; I found other ways and means of using leisure. I
rediscovered the beauty of the night sky and the environment, found a
like-minded person who is interested in wildlife, found the inclination to plan
a visit to the nearby Forest...
Can we function on a personal
level without a smartphone? In Urban India, not really. But is it an
essentiality, an unavoidable reality? Happily {being from Telecom}, No. I say so
because while I minimised my usage of the smart capabilities of my phone, I
could not take them to zero usage. Railway ticketing, option hunting, house
hunting etc would be pretty much impossible without a smartphone. Thus, being
from the Handset Trade, I am happy that the smartphone is now a ubiquitous
presence in large parts of India
I found my residence in Nagpur
on the Internet on my smart device; I found a job this way; I found many
locations and other titbits of information that way; I got great value
addition. Most critically, not one task came up where I felt that I
missed a Desktop or a Laptop. In my personal space, that had no value. But
all of this together did not use up much data, and therein lies the rub. In a
nutshell, while the smartphone was a massive value addition in important tasks
and is irreplacable, removing it from my personal space proved to be a value -
plus.
This places two clear
challenges for the app space and for the service companies : the absence of
offline payment mechanisms and their easy access {Cash cards, itzcash etc}, are
one area of deep concern. The complete absence of apps that can really add
value in personal tasks was another area. But most importantly, the fact that
all my personal tasks taken together did not use more than a few hundred MB of
data is a clear indication of the trend for the service industry in Telecom,
and its challenges, but more of that in another article in this series. Let us
leave this thought here.
I close this article with one
thought : is social media over-rated? In 15 days of minimum usage, I have
noticed no problems in being absent from Social Media. Sure, it is needed and a
nice way to keep in touch and being informed, but it is, beyond a point, completely useless;
moving away from Social Media has caused no problems so far as I can see. As a
matter of fact, it has lead to positives in many ways...
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