There is a website called secondlife.com. As the name suggests it is your second life. If you are fed up with your current avatar, you can change it to the way you like it and live your eLife. I created my account there and then somehow got so busy in my first life that I could not go there again! I just recalled it while writing this.
The point is we are living with multiple identities today.
Every morning, before we breathe, most of us open our mobile and check into some or the other app. The notification ‘bells’ drive us into this digital world of pings and we do as if that thing is ‘damn urgent’. We do what it wants us to do, browse the pings, copy paste the ‘Happy birthday messages, read some jokes and have a ‘digital laugh’, express through smileys, read the forwards (& mostly go backwards!). As we collide with the physical world, we go back to the original life and some time later log in again to the digital life. This back and forth continues till the day ends until we sleep with that cell phone near our own body cells.
In mythology Ravana had 10 faces, today we all have many ‘facebooks‘.
It must have been pretty difficult for Ravana to live with those 10 faces, so is the case with us.
This is not completely new though. In offline world as well we always had different identities. Professional life, Personal life, Life with friends et al, but they were few in numbers and only known to us. They were never so public and no one from professional life could mingle with your personal life. Now the identities are so interconnected, that you, at times, have make conscious efforts to keep them separate.
To add to it, there is this war against privacy. There is a constant threat that someone is watching you. You just don’t know who can use it against you and there is a clear evidence that you are being ‘influenced’ and used for.
So are we a ‘user’ or ‘used for’?
The answer is we are a bit of both. A fool with a tool is still a fool. Technology has given us this new tool, we have to use it wisely. Unfortunately no one is going to teach us do that. When I was a child (I still am many times!), we had a book named “Jagat Wagawe kase” (How to behave in the world), but at least till today, I have not come across any guide which can help us on how to behave in both these worlds. In contrast, there are many who are looking to use us for something.
We need to understand this. We need to Log in & Log out at our will. We need to balance this online and offline life, well. We need to juggle between ‘file’ to ‘life’ better (omg, both have same letters!). Remember, the server on the cloud might be in TBs (1 TB = 1024 GB) but the real clouds are in YBs (1 YB =10^15 GB).
Amazon is not only a website but a forest too.
Be online to make your offline life better.
Be a user, not a looser.