Are we too wired for our own good?

Finally, it is back - three days of living in isolation, almost on an island and now at long last I am connected again. Yes, that is what one feels, and I am sure, I am not the only one. Imagine if you can not being able to connect to the World Wide Web in today's times! For over three days now thanks to the inclement weather in Hyderabad (as well as other reasons we mere employees are not totally aware of), we have not had any Internet connectivity at work - this meant no " googling" for every word and phrase that crosses through one's mind, no surfing on the waves of the cyberspace and worse - no mails. To top it all, I was having problems with connectivity at home as well, and check this out, my television had conked out a couple of days earlier. I was truly truly living like a troglodyte, not by choice though.

Can't say, however, that this was a situation I didn't enjoy!

Initially, it seemed really weird. Picture this - you get to work, log on to your system and first start up your mail box; you clear the clutter in your Outlook, check out the mails; then of course there is more clutter to clear - this time from your personal mail ids which usually is two or more; thereafter of course you browse the net, check out a few "must visit" sites. Now of course is the time for the first cuppa. Ten minutes later you are back at your desk, a quick check to see if there are any new mails and only then do you actually get down to work. Isn't this a perfectly normal beginning to the day at work, especially if you work for a software firm? Now, consider not being able to check your mails first thing every morning. How would you really feel? That was us for the last three days!

Even though we were clearly told that there was no Internet connection, on the first day I just couldn't desist from shifting the focus to the mail box every now and then, and continuously pressing the F9 key. Then the futility of doing so struck me - every hour I was spending a few minutes just trying to check mails that actually weren't coming in. I closed my mailbox (and all the web browsers) and started to concentrate on work - and in the three days that we didn't have the net I got a lot more work done than I had in a real long time. There were fewer interruptions - within and without - and even less gaps in the thought process. I realized how actually having Internet connectivity all the time was rather gratuitous - everything that you needed to work with was actually right there; not being able to work without any kind of connectivity was indeed a whole lot of humbug. When one has free access to the Net all the time, one just tends to spend more time on it as well, whether it is really required or not. Consider this - no connectivity meant no emails to spend time on, no junk mails to clear out of your inbox, no way to "search" about things you don't really need to seek (at least not at that point of time), no clicking on random links that come your way for no other reason than that they are lying around.

At home too things were rather different. With no access to Internet at work, these days one is wont to get home and get connected. We had no such luxury at home as well. Not having television working was also a blessing in disguise. Both hubby and I are not avid TV-watchers. In fact, there isn't anything that we actually watch on a regular basis, except for the news. Yet, every evening hubby would come back home and switch the idiot box on surfing through channels aimlessly, almost as one does on the Internet. "Is there, will use" seemed to have been the mantra all this while. But ironically in the last few days we didn't really miss the boob tube as much. We talked more, listened to a lot more music than we usually do on a week day and also could sit down quietly and have dinner.

All this make me question the whole idea of modern day gadgets being the desiderata for modern day living. Is it really so? Or are we too wired for our own good? The world may have become a smaller place and there probably are innumerable means of communication, nay instant communication, these days; but are we really communicating or we merely flitting by touching one another rather peripherally? Don't we all have innate skills that actually suffice to get day to day work done, and in that sense aren't the modern day technological appurtenances more of an aberration rather than a prerequisite?