This evening as I sat at the office at 11:30 PM at night (not unusual for me by any means), I was doing atleast about half a dozen things at the same time… I was composing a document for work, chatting with a co-worker on ICQ, chatting with my mother on Yahoo! Messenger, talking with Karenika and another friend on AIM and at the same time also surfing the web and writing up the previous blog entry. And while I did all of that at once, it was a just an amazing feeling to realize that ALL of that… every single one of them was only possible because of the power of the Web.

Yes, it’s cliched to say the Net changes everything…. but for me and for ALL of those people who have grown up with the Net and especially the generation after ours for whom the Net has always been there… it’s a complete paradigm shift. The social impact of the Net is probably orders of magnitude more profound than anything anyone could dream up of in “e-commerce”, “b-2-b” or <insert buzzword-compliant word from e-high-tech jargon dictionary here>.

Socially, the Net has caused changes which we didn’t even imagine or forsee. IM’ing is a huge one. I still don’t believe that the full potential of IM’ing has been realized to date. As I write this, I’m concurrently holding conversations with people in New Delhi, New York, Boston and Pittsburgh…. all at once. And my mind, like the minds of several others out there and especially the newer generation, implicitly understands the concept of “threading” conversations, i.e. holding multiple conversations at once, while maintaing the state in each individual one. The ability of the mind to multi-process has become a heck of a lot more commonplace than our parents and grandparents could ever imagine.

Information access… I talk to people from different countries and different cultures everyday. There are cultural references which are now resolves in under seconds… My friend in Boston used a reference in our discussion this eveing which was alien to me… but within seconds, I was on a page which explained it. (Did I mention that Google rocks 🙂 ) I truly cannot imagine what people did in the days without google! Last week, as I was writing code, I made the same remark to a co-worker, “how the heck did people write code without google!?”

I know that Carnegie Mellon, my alma mater, has a reputation for being about as geeky as geeky can get (It was recently again named “Most Wired” – which is somewhat ironic, since the reason CMU was named most wired is because it is really the most unwired since CMU has the single largest installation of a wireless network – you can literally take your notebook and walk anywhere on campus and be on the Net all the time.) So my being from CMU and and interacting with primarily CMU folks doesn’t give the upcoming observation a very un-biased sample set…. but… Even in something as basic as dating, the Net generation doesn’t think of getting phone numbers… they thing of getting an email address or an IM id.

I’m sur there are enough people doing their Ph.Ds in examing the social impacts of the Web and I really didn’t write this to steal any of their thunder… but I truly do believe that of everything the Net is credited for, its role in reshaping society and culture as we knew it is probably not given its due credit.

In the days after the aftermath of September 11th, the thing that bothered me the most and what I wrote about was that suicide attacks essentially changes the entire dynamics of dealing with hijackings, hostage situations and virtually any threat. Thus far, the assumption has always beent hat the prepetrators atleast fear death and want to get themselves out alive and therefore that gives us a few means of trying to analyze a situation. But when people lose respect for life and they have nothing more to lose, then it changes the rules of the game.

My mom forwarded me this news story this evening: Suicide attack in J&K assembly kills 29. If you look at the story and see the picture of the car that was used in the attack… a Tata Sumo is about as big as a Land Cruiser (okay, definitely yuckier than a Land Cruiser, but dimension wise that would give you an idea). This is precisely what is scary… the fact that there will be more lunatics who will make belief their weapon (see my previous diatribe on this in the archives).

I think the best illustration of how this changes the rules of the game is in this story where a United Airlines pilot delivered a pre-flight speech in which he instructed passengers how to overpower any hijackers that might be aboard. An article on Salon.com – Experts urge airline passengers to fight that was linked to the story also put it well:

The take-charge approach is a shift in decades-long attitudes by both pilots and passengers that cooperation is the best approach for dealing with hijackers.

But that belief “was based on the fundamental premise that the hijackers are rational human beings and want to live,” said Raleigh Truitt, a pilot who heads his own aviation consulting firm in New Jersey.

“When you’re on an airplane and it’s controlled by people who are … bent on destroying themselves and others,” he said, “the reaction has to be different.”

Be it a plane, a car bomb, a shooting spree, biological weapons, chemical weapons or any other form of action that causes harm to innocent people… what is really the recourse against such brainwashing and complete loss of sensibility? Is there any?

Several weeks ago, I landed up on this site called TheWhyILog and it got me thinking about why I myself am doing this? Though I did touch on the topic when I resurrected sneaker.org now that I’ve been doing it for a while, I think I could write more about it so…

Blogging is a weird thing. At some level it goes completely against my fears of privacy and security and at a different level it has become somewhat addictive. I guess the inklings of becoming a blogger probably started when I put up my original home page (what I now call vanity pages) and began posting weekly updates on what’s new on the page; but I never got completely hooked until recently I think it was around mid-july 2000 when I really go into it. But why? I’m not an extroverted person by any means, so why would I get so addicted to blogging? Why wouldn’t the fears of security and privacy take precedence over the urge to share information over a public medium?

To a large extent I, and possibly several other bloggers as well, treat this as a vent, a release, something to let the pressure out lest it muster inside to the point of causing a devastating explosion. Especially, when you’re not sharing the stuff inside your heard with another person – and that could be for multiple reasons, either you don’t have anyone you can share it with (an s.o.), or you’re not comfortable sharing it with the people who you know would care (family and friends), or you’re just afraid of only a few people knowing what you think. In either case, and possibly in several others, blogging becomes the substitute and a damn good one at that.

My fears of privacy and security still come up every once in a while and possibly taint my entries somewhat, however, for the most part there is a security in public anonymity, as I have described it earlier. The web becomes the audience. An audience you do not know and so cannot for the most part fear. What you write is public.. available to everyone… so there are no secrets and if there are no secrets there is less to worry about. It’s an open book. What I write in my blog is an open book. If you care enough to read it, more power to you.

The reason I started blogging was because I just had to (and still have to…) get things out of my system. The biggest thing being my immense frustration with irrationality, followed closely by my need to widen my circle of friends which, as I realized a bit too late, had dwindled into a null set during the time I was going out with my now ex-girlfriend (nearly 4 years). So there was a void I needed to fill and blogging filled it for me. It gave me an outlet and has also helped me to get closer with some of my existing friends since even though we may not discuss what I write about on my site now know me better than they did… to be a social recluse who often thinks too much 😉

The one other thing I hoped to achieve by blogging was to come across people who have a head on their shoulders. I’ve found that most people who blog seriously (about more than just this is what I did today) are generally all highly intelligent, well read and mature individuals. Similarly, my site is really targeted towards people who think and those who like to think. To drive the point home by use of an exaggeration: Stupid people annoy me and since I can’t find enough people with adequate clue in real life, the Net is the medium that may help me establish contact with people who may have learnt to make use of their ability to think.

So why do you blog?