Email entered my life about twenty five years
ago… For those of you who are familiar
with the computers of that era, we wrote our stuff on VT220 or VT320 terminals.
The snazzier ones among them had black screens and amber/gold characters…. Nevertheless, most of the work was still done
over phone, and emails were used to record the conversations, at best. Then
came the GUI – or graphic user interface and the mouse, and our lives changed
forever.
Over time, particularly in the last decade or so,
mobile phones, internet and emails have invaded – (I was about to say improved, but will stick with “invaded”) – our
lives, to point that it can be called pollution, or technically, e-pollution.
As we keep moving “forward” with our civilization, banks, mobile phones,
identity cards, email accounts, shopping preferences, brand preferences,
dietary inclinations, and perhaps medical records will become inextricably
linked like an unholy mass of spaghetti topped with some gooey sauce. One will
need to find one’s way through that, putting to shame all the adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Indiana Jones.
Now everybody and “everything” have begun to send emails or SMS.
Auto-mailers, alert systems, “human-free” marketing campaigns, digital
signatures, “green initiatives” eliminating paper, location-based services
(LBS) on phones mean that one is bombarded throughout the day with some message
or the other. Like persistent rain that refuses to intensify or go away…
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp only serve
to add to the total confusion with messages, videos, links, and comments from
the entire bunch of people you have come across in life, and would not
necessarily prefer to be in daily contact, as also from people who are contacts’
contacts of the people in your contact list…. Like a bunch of trees in a forest
that have all chosen to intertwine their branches. You can very well imagine
what will happen to the forest floor.
The upshot is that you have to learn the art of
deleting. I have followed a simple rule on emails for very many years : F-A-D,
or File – Answer – Delete, on a daily basis for all my email accounts, both
personal and office. Now that is spreading to my mobile as well.
As mobiles become smarter with larger storage
capacities, the capacity to store any and everything has increased, while
operational stability has not. Thus to keep the mobile in basic operational
health, one will have to keep removing stuff on a daily basis. Of late I have
been deleting about thirty videos and fifty-odd pictures along with countless
messages, each day. And then Google automatically backs up your phone on the
cloud – which means you need to go up there clean that space too !! Sometimes I
wonder, why does one need to share a selfie ? We know how you look !!
If you switch off the Wi-Fi, there is no respite.
They will be crouching like tigers in cyberspace, to flood your phone with an e-vengeance
as soon as it is connected. Happens every morning and after every flight.
I have realised that we have reached THE AGE OF
DELETION !!
We do need to read, or at least skim through before
we hit the delete button. And it takes time !! We are beginning to spend the better part of our
waking hours reading important / unimportant messages, baseless trivia,
unwanted information on people’s vacations and daily chores, and then deleting
them, or worse, forwarding them to others,
to spread the clutter.
Of late I am averaging about two to three hours
each day deleting messages from my multiple inboxes and mobile phone, and by
the time I am done, there are some more lined up for the next day !! We need to build an app for that – one that will skim through the incoming avalanche,
filter stuff according to my preferences, and automatically delete the rest.
What is happening ? As we get enmeshed in this
digital world, the plethora of passwords, videos, pictures, messages – both genuine
and contrived are becoming a burden on the average mind and memory. There is no
time to “stand and stare”; no time to contemplate, no time to look within….
***
From the dawn of civilization, we have lived in the
“age of creation”.
Shakespeare wrote about thirty plays, one hundred
and fifty-odd sonnets and some more poems in his lifetime. Wordsworth wrote
more than three hundred and fifty. R.N. Tagore composed two thousand plus
songs, seven dance-dramas, set up a university and became an institution by
himself. Nazrul Islam composed about three thousand poems in a short span
before an illness rendered him speechless and partially paralyzed.
I wonder if any of them would have been so prolific
with their creations if they had to spend the better part of their days
deleting stuff that they did not want in the first place….
No wonder we do not have great, original, contemporary
thinkers….
Now that you have finished reading this, let’s go
back to deleting stuff… I have started already !!
***
