The Hindu Business Line : Learn to embrace technology

Meera and Ram, very dear friends, invited me to stay with them when I recently travelled to their city. I agreed, thinking that it would be a great way to catch up on the happenings in our lives. What I got was all that and more because I had the privilege of meeting Meera’s 84-year-old mother who was staying with them.

She blew me away with her erudition on a wide range of subjects. What stunned me even more was when she said she had recently learnt how to Google to locate classical music Web sites, download music and listen to the music clips at her leisure. When I told her about being able to get video clips, as well, on YouTube, she immediately wrote down the web address; I am sure that by now she has enjoyed not just listening to the old masters, but also seeing them on the video clips. I came back home and while flipping channels, came across the Jay Leno show where they featured a 40-strong English music group where the youngest member was in the mid-eighties! Three of the band members said they did it for the fun of it and to prove that “they still had what it takes”!

On a tech roller coaster

In our lives today, we are regularly confronted by a plethora of changes induced by technology which end up making even routine activities seem daunting. We are all on a roller coaster ride where the ups and downs become ever more frightening. While a small minority amongst us may be immune to fear and may find it exhilarating, for most of us it is plain scary. The net result is a sense of inadequacy which most often manifests itself as a defiant “I don’t need all this stuff” Ludditism. Unfortunately, we cannot escape into an alternate universe at will; our lives have to be lived in the real world.

In my view, what has happened is that the technologies that power our daily living have become complex and powerful. The high priests of such technologies have probably begun to sound as abstruse as the Egyptian high priests of the ancient Pharaonic times. Those high priests did that to keep all commoners spellbound in awe and superstition and to help perpetuate their power. Today, there is one big difference — power comes not by holding back knowledge, but by being able to synthesise enormous amounts of available data into usable pieces of information. The ancients kept control by keeping knowledge restricted to a very limited circle; for today’s experts, power comes from an ability to make sense out of the cacophony of too much information. Luckily for us, today’s experts are there to demystify and not to mystify.

Even with all this, most of us are perpetually tense about our continuing discomfort with and, in extreme cases, alienation from the very technologies that are supposed to help us lead easier lives. I would suggest that this need not be so. If we treat technology as a mere pipeline that carries content of various types that makes our lives richer, then the cloud will lift immediately. The toxic worry of inadequacy will diminish considerably. The trick is not to worry about the complexities of technology, but to ask if this or that technology will make it easier for us to lead our lives more satisfactorily. Once enough of us decide, good companies will figure out ways to make their products easy to use and enjoy. The iPod is a classic case in point. With more and more companies figuring out that common people are likely to tune out any product that is too geeky, the future looks promising.

Let’s cast aside our technophobia and emulate Meera’s mother; there is a wonderful world out there beckoning us.

(The writer is advisor to 3i Infotech, Blue River Capital and IDFC Pvt Equity.)