The old man always woke up by 5 am. In the past, it was the crows' crowing or the roosters that served as his alarm. But because crows and fowl have had their sleep cycles disrupted as a result of excessive Internet usage, he now uses a $4.99 alarm clock his son bought at Walmart. It needs a step-down voltage transformer to even work here, but in keeping with the Indian ethic of not wasting anything even if it means spending extra money on things like step-down transformers, he had it set up right next to his bed, a bundle of wires and adapters kept ordered by a lot of scotch tape.
His day is quite regimented. After morning ablutions, he expects his filter coffee right next to The Hindu , which he proceeds to read from the “The” to “Printed and published by.” In the past, when the children of the house woke up (or were forcibly woken up by the insidious switching off of the bedroom's fan by the maid who wanted to sweep the room), the old man held court. Having just been informed of happenings in the world, he would proceed to lecture the children on what was going on. The Emergency of 1976 wasn't such a bad thing, he would pontificate, because it streamlined government services, made employees more accountable, at least in South India. The kids knew better than to argue because he had two trump cards, his age and information asymmetry. His comprehensive newspaper-reading habit gave him an advantage over kids who mostly just read the Sports page and Young World .
But then, this was the past.
The 12-year-old with his own laptop and broadband Internet connection is now better informed than the stereotypical The Hindu -wielding grandfather figure in any house. While his age advantage still remains, Wikipedia gives the kid an edge his grandfather will never have. This makes for interesting early-morning discussions. “ Dei , did you know that there was a contest in China where people had to cover themselves in bees?” “Yawn, I saw that on Youtube a week ago”. “Did you know that in 1969, on this day, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon?” “Of course, it was on the Wikipedia home page last midnight, and I even saw an entire documentary my friend shared on Facebook a year ago.” And so on.
But this raises an interesting point about how people in the future will conduct discussions. If both sides are armed to the tooth with facts from the Internet in real-time, logic might dictate that debates will be much fairer and less susceptible to information asymmetry. But when logic dictates anything, human beings usually tend to be the kids in the back benches, not paying attention to the teacher.
A very common trick that the Internet generation has learnt is the usage of facts to confuse rather than to inform. For example, if I were debating the merits of Lady Gaga with someone who does not like her music, I find myself using my superior knowledge of music theory (learnt from Youtube, no less) to come up with arguments that my opponent will simply not even understand. Of course, the other guy can use pointless business terms like “value chain synergising” (learnt from videos uploaded by Harvard Business School) to confuse me.
All in all, intellectual bullying seems to have become way too easy in the web era and the stentorian The Hindu -reading grandfather isn't the only gladiator in this arena.
Published - July 22, 2011 04:59 pm IST
