Social, Cultural and Technological Changes I saw in my Life, an Auto-Ethonography
I was born in the 90s. My generation has seen some incredible technological advancements in a very short span of time. I remember as a kid my mom used to take me to buy the vegetables in the local market but since a few years, even she orders the groceries from Grofers- an online supermarket store that delivers yours orders to your doorstep. My dad used to know every lane, every street in the city. These days, he just sets the location on the GPS and asks the driver to follow. Be it clothing, footwear, accessories, electronics and even something as valuable as gold, can be bought from the comfort of our homes. There was a time when I used to rent VCRs and then DVDs to watch movies at home. Today I have the option of viewing that same movie or any movie ever released from Netflix or PrimeVideo or any other streaming service online. I used to buy music cassettes as a kid and made mix tapes. Later, when the mobile phones came, I visited a mobile Shop with my SD card to get the latest songs. Today I can stream any song online and can most certainly download a majority of them without having to pay anything to anyone. Mobile phones and computers have undergone a tremendous change too. I fondly remember the black and white Nokia 3310, which had the snake game. Then after a long time I owned the legendary Nokia 5233, a few Motorolas and most recently an iPhone. The mobile phone have gone from clunky keypads to smooth touch gestures, slow, black and white screens to vivid wide screens with resolutions rivalling even the computer monitors. It is even claimed that an average smartphone today has more processing power than the whole of NASA when they sent Neil Armstrong to the moon.
Culturally, the society, the people around me too have changed in these years. People are slowly getting aware of the career opportunities beyond Engineering and Medicine. T shaped education — broad based education with a depth in certain topics is being implemented in schools. People are starting to question blind faith, superstitions. Mass media has brought the world issues in our living room. People are actively monitoring the events of the worldwide. They are also participating, questioning, debating about them. The film industry has started producing some unconventional movies. Technology has empowered the citizens to exercise their democratic rights in ways unimaginable before. As a result, the society at a large I would say has become a bit more mature, a bit more tolerant. On the flip side though, now I see fewer smiles than I used to when I was a kid. The lives were much harder then but still, people were happy. They were friendly, accommodating. They were content. My mom was ok with me leaving the house without a cell phone. She did not constantly worry as she does now about my whereabouts. My dad did not warn me every other day about the disturbing news and ask me to be careful. I guess unlike these days, they trusted the world before.
Social networks have brought people from all over the world together. We have hundreds of connections, followers, friends online but not many of them are worth actual consideration. The richness, the tangibleness in them is missing. People today are indecisive. There are too many options. This makes everything seem replaceable. So people don’t stick through the problems. Now do not get me wrong here, professionally, through collaborations we are doing things that we not possible before but personally, the depth, the innate understanding that can only come through time remains elusive. To compensate for that people have multiple shallow interactions with people from all over the world. It is as the Chainsmokers’ song Sick Boy,
“Feed yourself with my life’s work
How many likes is my life worth?”
Overall, I think we have come a long way from where we were and definitely the best days of our lives are yet to come but it is a worrying thought when digital identities become more important than physical realities.
