Monday, June 8, 2009

Welcome to my new weekly column

Dear reader,

This is a new weekly column to light up my own Monday.
It's called ‘Monday Is Here But I’m Elsewhere.’ Please note that I welcome guest writers and contributors. If you are a regular reader, you may support my suspect edifice by volunteering to write one of these columns.
You may also propose alternative titles for this Monday column such as the 'Monday's Putrid Monologue' or 'Monday is Not Really Manic, It's Like Any Other Day, So Please Just Shut Up About It'. Feel free.
This project is free of grand purpose. It’s fun for me and I hope I don’t bore you to tears.
If you'd like to contribute, please get in touch.
Cheers,
Reportergirl


Monday Is Here But I’m Elsewhere

I’m back in 1996, when I sent and received my first e-mail. I remember being nervous in the cybercafé where this monumental event occurred and somewhat awestruck by the sheer speed of communication. Just a week into the world of email, the little red postbox in Sadashivanagar began to look quaint and old-world to me.

And now a decade later, I routinely say yes to facebook friends with not much thought, I put up breezy status updates (sincere but not too self-revelatory). I instant-share inane thoughts on twitter and I record longer observations here on this blog.

But what has really changed is my increasing susceptibility to communication. By sheer dint of its availability, I now have the ability to reach out and be reached by an ever-widening circle of people. Here’s a list of all the ways in which you can reach me, read me, follow me and affect me.

1) My Blog
2) My Twitter Account
3) Facebook
4) Gmail
5) Work mail
6) Mobile Phone (And because I have an iphone, I can access all the above on my phone and listen to music at the same time)

Surely, this level of message sending and getting is altering my neuronal circuitry in permanent ways. I already feel the effects of having so many pulls on my attention. I’m less able to focus completely on a given task. I’m highly susceptible to distraction. I used be fairly disciplined but now, I feel like one of those rats in a Skinner experiment, constantly pushing the lever for an instant fix of some salty, deep-fried thing (new content, new music, new news).

Another problem with all this connectedness is that one seems to teeter on the edge of more and more self-revelation. It feels to me like I’m always on the brink of saying/writing something in public (or to people I don’t know all that well) that is better off kept private. (Even if it’s some inane thing like having dirt under my fingernails, I’m now broadcasting it to more than a 100 people including work colleagues and clients)

There are even new words for this sort of thing. ‘Oversharing’ and ‘semiotic promiscuity’ are just two of the terms I’ve recently encountered and immediately liked, for they confirm vague experiences I didn’t necessarily have a name for.

I love all the advantages of this brave new internet world and the easy access to a ready audience of friends and acquaintances. But there is also now, in me, a slow but sure rebellion. As the e-brevity of communication sharpens, I find myself equally drawn to long form e-mails that quite faithfully mimic traditional letter-writing. I adore the ornateness of salutations and sign-offs, of emotions recollected, rather than instantly transmitted over chat. There is a formality of expression in e-letters that seems almost as quaint now as that little red postbox.

In fact, in what is a sure reaction to the extreme functional and casual nature of most online exchange, I find myself writing long e-mails. It’s not that I’m rosy eyed about the past—or believe that things were vastly better then. I’m quite aware that nostalgia is a sentimental trickster. Maybe I’m just a little scared of these trendy new changes, a tad suspicious of all this connectedness. And maybe, I’m looking for some rules and conventions and a return to mental discipline where there seems to be none.

What do you think? How have all these technologies affected you? I’d love to hear about it.

4 comments:

hyacinths said...

ummm... i still write long letters and i suspect i'm the only person keeping the postal ppl on their toes. i have a stamp budget, and if i find pretty stamps, then i stash them away, and never post them.
I also ramble on and on in emails, which is why there is no output on any of my blogs (i used to blog TOO much, now too little) but i do scribble away in my Moleskine, and vow to make time to write constructively. heh heh...
yes, the constant connectivity is a PIA sometimes, but i've learnt to not look at my phone on weekends, and have almost cut off FB. Twitter has patches of lean and overload on some days, but when i do switch off, its complete. and then i read a book in a day, and crochet, and cook, and swim, and cuddle, and take pictures, and all's right with the world :)

hyacinths said...

shite! rambling, forgot to mention, would like to contribute Mundane, Mad, Mood-swingy paras to 'Monday is Not Really Manic, It's Like Any Other Day, So Please Just Shut Up About It'. :)

Reportergirl said...

Thanks for the long, chatty comments Hyacie. I'm really happy you want to contribute under the abovesaid title. Send me your moody lines and I will be most happy to post them. Look forward to it!

Kunal Shah said...

am concerned about FB and email privacy but that doesnt stop me from writing personal viewpoints although i have unconsciously mastered of the art of not over-revealing too much information. in fact, i think all of us have become intelligent about what we write.

the biggest way in which social networking and web2.0 (FB, blogging and twitter) have affected me is that I have become more expressive. so this is a major plus.