http://desicritics.org/ Superior South Asian bloggers on Culture, Media, Politics, Sport, Business, and Technology. en Copyright 2006 by the authors Thu, 23 Feb 2006 08:26:46 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss BC custom software http://desicritics.org/2006/02/23/082646.php Sabarish<p>The web is quite a different and interesting entity now, compared to how it was a couple of years back. One can do so much on the net today, apart from emails and searching for information, we can now socialize, auction, shop, earn, transfer money, blog, sms, share photos and much more. Every day more websites spring up, offering some new feature and service for the hungry surfers.</p> <p>There are way too many sites, where it is almost mandatory to become a member these days. Some examples are orkut, hi5, yahoo! 360, sms.ac, flickr, del.icio.us, blogger, technorati, birthday alarm, to name a few. It is a major pain to remember the usernames and passwords for all these sites and sometimes its easy to forget even which site we registered in! We end up registering and not visiting some of these sites. Or we post a query in some community and forget all about it the next day!</p> <p>One thing that is common to all of these sites is that it "exposes" us further. Through every one of these sites, we are revealing more and more of ourselves to the world. It is so easy now to find out the entire life history of a person, including photos and info about their schools, colleges, parents, friends, work, holidays and what not on the web.</p> <p>Why do we have a hit counter (or two or three) to check the number of visitors to our blog or website and feel happy to see that someone, somewhere is reading about us? Why do we feel happy to see a comment or two in our blogs? Why do we upload our private photos to flickr and let people around the world see them? Why do we blog or have a website in the first place?</p> <p>I wonder what makes us want to scream out loud <b>"I'm alive! Look at me"</b> through these sites?! </p> <p>Most people seem to have more of a life online than offline. People tend to be more open and expressive on the World Wide Web, than their own homes. It is as if we are almost afraid that we will be lost and forgotten and not accepted and what is more frightening is the fact that all of us seem to be very lonely nowadays. The days and nights that we spend feeling truly alone seem to be increasing, inspite of being active on all these sites and making new friends every day!</p> <p>The net has become a very addictive place for most of us and seems to give us a bigger high than anything else. We are given a new life online, where we can live life as we want to, and due to which, we are neglecting more and more of the real life - life offline.</p> <p>With more and more companies starting to focus more of their research and development on the new web, more online services are going to come up, which is only going to increase our dependence on the Internet. </p> <p>I don't know if it is good or bad to be so dependent on something that is not even real and to have all that information about us floating about in a big virtual world.</p> <p>While you're at it do visit my <a href="http://sabarish.net">site</a> and make my day, when I see an increased visitor count and realise that more strangers are reading about me.</p> <p><i>I guess we are too deep in the rabbit hole to come out now...</i><br/> <!--ED:Aaman--></p> BizTech566@desicritics.org Thu, 23 Feb 2006 08:26:46 EST