Nothing like new technology

(bdnews24.com, December 25, 2010)

Many years ago, the phenomenon called the Internet arrived in the subcontinent. It was not very extensive, Google did not exist as a public service and Wiki-anything was still unknown. Connections were slow, the bandwidth was limited and getting online was expensive, a privilege of corporate houses and the wealthy at home. That was the first coming.
To be a part of the wave had a certain special snob value that could not be matched by anything else that could be bought off the shelves, even the mobile phone, which was an equally prestigious acquisition at the time. The reach of this new concept was enormous, its potential unimaginable, its possibilities endless. Writers could be read all over the world without too much effort, information could be exchanged almost instantly and communication was no longer a case of missed phone calls and waiting for the postman to deliver the mail.

In that time and space, journalists had tough choices to make. The adventurous plunged into this new realm of technology driven news-gathering, developing abilities that they had perhaps never been trained for. They had to create stories without delay, since they had only a small and often unlikely chance of being first to ‘break’ something. Newspapers and magazines were starting to explore the idea of an online edition, cautiously and with many reservations, primarily because many of the established journalists were of an older school that was wary of anything that happened too quickly and used too much science that needed too much explanation.

The dotcom wave was sweeping through this part of the world and many bright and ambitious individuals were buying their ways into it. Salaries that were tempting, to say the least, were up for grabs — all that you needed was excitement, enthusiasm and a certain recklessness and willingness to play in an unknown field.

And then the bubble went pop. There was no money being made, since advertisers had not yet caught up with the immense potential of this new medium. Many of the better established writers and editors stayed away, preferring the tangible evidence of bylines to the rather more ephemeral world of the Internet, where you could read writing only if you knew where to look for it, most cited.

If you were published online, you ‘vanished’, was often the belief. But it was a time when those who looked very far ahead bought domains, registered URLs and were savvy enough to squat on possibly lucrative-in-the-future space in the cyberworld and wait until the rest of mankind caught up. The recession did quite a lot to destroy a great many dreams of this kind, but patience did pay off. The dotcom business is back!

I do not speak just as an insider, working in the Internet space and writing for this newspaper, an online publication. I speak as someone who has watched people and their attitudes evolve from being wary of and shying away from a new medium to absorbing and accepting it as something that has more interesting possibilities that should — must, really — be looked into and tapped. Today, as part of a web company, managing content and looking for new ways to capture audiences, I realise the huge range of permutations that can be easily managed, new ways of presenting the information, innovative methods of finding that same information and a hitherto unknown universe of design and style and creativity using technology and stimulating the very core of human thought processes.

And the reservations have, to a great extent, dissolved. Writers are flocking to the Internet space to write blogs, to create fiction chains, to find kindred spirits, to sell their works. They are discovering novel ways to present their writing, to tap into new audiences, to explore new ways of saying things that have been said so many times over since man started learning how to write. The feeling of ‘vanishing’ has itself vanished, and even the known and famous advocate use of the Net to show off their work to the discerning, to locate agents that could help, to publish unedited writing and have it critiqued or to present new stories for a select – and occasionally paying – reader population. And there is now money to be made with that kind of writing, since those with advertising budgets are willing to give healthy cheques for work of quality that can be used to bring the public in to browse and thus increase page views.

New technology is never a bad thing, especially if it does nothing to disturb the balance of the environment and our world. The Internet is indeed technology of a unique kind, non-polluting, not-interfering, non-invasive, for the most part with no attached health hazards (apart from human weaknesses like addiction to Facebook and online chatting) that should become part of every life, if only for the enormous realm of novelty that can be explored to learn, to study, to think, to understand and to reach out to the rest of the world out there.