In this piece in Business World of 18 March 2004, I anticipated the integration of the computer with the radio, television and the telephone with its revolutionary implications.
The bitstream becomes a torrent
The pride of place in many an Indian drawing room belongs
to the television set. Day after day, week after week, it unfolds the drama of
life before countless families, irrespective of caste, class, colour and
gender. Some watch the vicissitudes of family lives, whilst others treat the
world as their family. Some like to lose themselves in the fantasies of Hindi
films, whilst others prefer to let sermons elevate their souls. Some watch for
illumination, others for titillation. All experience what they like – or what
their parents let them like. But in the course of watching they are
transformed. India today is a more cosmopolitan, more open, altogether more
tolerant country than it was even a decade ago; television has inured it to the
extremities of human experience.
If the drawing room belongs to
the television set, the passage belongs to the telephone. For everyone wants it
within her reach. The father wants to ask his broker about Infosoft. The mother
wants to ask the teacher about the daughter’s C+. The daughter wants to borrow
an album from her friend. They will all think of all this at the same time; the
telephone is the most fought-over family asset. Now, with the advent of the
mobile, the skirmishes over the possession of the telephone have become less
fierce. But it is a gluey little instrument; some people find it difficult to
dislodge it from their ears.
And in a corner of the bedroom or
bathroom there still lurks a device whose place the television usurped – the
radio. The father must have his morning dose of chant; but once it has purified
his mind, it is neglected the rest of the day. Nowadays the radio gets lumped
together with a cassette and a compact disc player. If it is, the father is
unlikely to keep it for long; it will long ago have been hijacked into the
teenager’s room where it will be blaring out amorous inanities.
And somewhere at the back of the
wardrobe lies a camera which the father fishes out whenever there is an
occasion to remember. The difficulty is in remembering what would be worth
remembering – would the trip to the ethnic restaurant deserve to be recorded?
Or were the culinary experience best forgotten?
In this family of entertainment
machines has entered an intruder whom no one knows where to keep – the
computer. Because of some things it does – turning words into alphabet, or
making instantaneous calculations – it should by rights belong to the
children’s study. But its possession is now contested by older members of the
family who want to email their cousins in Australia or bunt around for a bride.
Today, all these machines can be
digital – all they would do is to convert bits and bytes into visual and
auditory experiences. Not only are the machines separate; they are often front
ends of different delivery channels – the television of a cable, the radio of
an electromagnetic wave, the computer perhaps of an optical fibre. They are all
separate because they belong to different generations – the telephone to the
1870s, radio to the 1890s, the television to the 1930s, the PC to the 1980s.
The computer was the only device
to be born digitized; it was so successful that all the others have married it
and got themselves digitized too. It is only a matter of time when their
children will combine their various gifts. Already it is impossible to tell a
mobile from a camera, a computer from a music player. The devices are getting
indiscriminately hybridized. Soon a time will come when it will become
impossible to tell their pedigree.
But that day of harmonious unity
is slow in coming. The fault lies in the sluggishness of human imagination; the
whiz kids in Sony and Samsung are just taking too long to invent a mobile which
one can spread out and turn into a television. But the governments are to blame
too. They like to regulate everything; they feel deprived and neglected if they
cannot interfere. Convergence is a word they have heard; some have even
enshrined it in legislation. But it is difficult for them to see that matters
might come more quickly to the boil if there was less legislation.
But despite the frailties of the
human mind, despite the ponderous human governments, communication devices will
dissolve into one another, and new ones will emerge which will take us humans
to new heights of beauty and ugliness, excitement and boredom, ecstasy and
irritation. Tomorrow will be another day – so different that our children will
find it difficult to believe that we enjoyed being glued to flickering 21-inch
screens.
