- I have conveniently moved to a text (messaging) mode to communicate with friends and relatives. This is asynchronous and non-intrusive. My friend/relative can message me back,again being non-intrusive to me. A phone call is only for immediate action or an emergency. A phone call made in an ad hoc manner makes the receiver put down or stop whatever he/she is doing and attend to your call. And a phone call factored in with all the courtesies will need a dedicated 10 mins per call. Imagine this - if we have 5 relatives and 10 friends in our inner circle, this means 15 X 10 minutes on phone calls alone.
- On the other hand a phone call is absolutely essential when you need to influence or intensely communicate something to some one in business or personal lives. However when I say a 'phone call' what I mean is a call using the internet.
- With 3G on my phone and with wifi in almost every place, nothing prevents me from texting someone and asking 'can we do a skype call'? I then Skype/Google Hangout/Use any video call over the internet to do those special calls.
- It is a similar situation with Gmail or Yahoo mail that I used for personal email services. Most of my Gmails I get are promotional mails or spam. The Yahoo group that I had for a purpose has given away to a facebook page.
- I have at least five different chat clients on my phone largely because I have friends distributed across them.
- And Whatsapp is the king! Whether I chat with my teenage boys or my friends, it is so convenient to just use Whatsapp.
Now where is all this leading to?
1. I'm tied to my phone I check it once midnight. I cannot be without it because I have carved out a habit around that. Can I divorce myself from the phone? Impossible unless I become a monk in the Himalayas.
2. My personal space has become slightly more public. (For people of Gen-Y it has full changed). I like 'click a pic and post' just to share momentary points of interest with my friends. Sometimes I make remarks just because the phone enables me to do that and I'm not sure if this is a good thing. I have to be on guard about what I share and what I don't.
3. I'm creating and contributing to the mounds of inconsequential data that is growing exponentially. Is this even sustainable? Companies in network, storage and compute spaces are making merry just because people like me want to' create data once use it once and forget it forever' as opposed to 'create once use it forever'.
4. I'm creating more security issues and therefore better business for the security companies and hackers.
Vicious loop :-)
