Isn’t it THE time?
Isn’t it time to realize that the world today needs more discipline. Time to realize that we now have a 4th important factor of our Habitat and we need to protect it — The Internet
We all know the internet is no longer something that it used to be — a medium to connect systems. It is a medium to connect people, a necessity for business. We share with our family, at times the world what we do, where we go, our emotions, our joy, our sorrow and pretty much everything. It has become an integral part of our Life. At the workplace, at home, during travel, during emergencies, during a pandemic.
You are almost there — but I don’t want to coin that term that is terrifying the whole world today. I ain’t writing this article because I am working from home, neither because I am crazy about the count — the likes, the subscribers, the followers. It annoys me and I am sure it annoys most of you too when we see individuals, businesses hashtag their posts with the deadly virus just to gain attention. Is it really necessary! In the name of learning and exploring people are creating fancy and colorful visualizations showing the spread of the virus, how many are dead and how many are about to die! You staying home and safe is really appreciated but isn’t there any other Dataset left to explore. Seriously?
The Pandemic; if there is one thing that I have learned from it, then it is this — We are polluting the Digital Space, and as much as we care about our air, our water, our soil, and our environment; an equal and in fact even more care and responsibility is what we need in order to curb the Digital POLLUTION to protect our Digital Space.
What contributes to Digital POLLUTION?
According to me anything that is not original, anything that encourages violence, hatred, destruction, spreads rumors, glorifies self-proclamation, encourages plagiarism, misguide the coming generation crippling their thought power, makes them focus on quantity over quality, glorifies the false glamour, virtual fame and pushes the innocent minds to extremities, anything that discourages innovation, empathy, kindness, gratitude — is filth and should be stopped from spreading like a virus polluting our digital space.
If net neutrality is a concern for us then this should also be of grave concern for all of us. We cannot let our kids be carried away by the amount of junk many apps are generating and incentivize its users to do the same. Most of us will agree to this harsh truth. Our kids are showing less and less interest in books, and by books, I don’t only mean the academic ones! We rarely talk about producing Leaders, we aren’t trying to imbibe the qualities of honesty and integrity; we are rather using every possible aspect of us — the kids, the surrounding; all for a mere self-proclamation. Self-proclamation is a form of self-appreciation and when it goes beyond a certain limit it makes one lose self-respect. Our kids need to know that thin line. Awards and Recognition must be an outcome of healthy and real competition. The virtual compensation in the form of views and likes cannot and should not become the gauge to measure success vs. failure, winner vs. loser. They should merely be a metric of “how many” and NOT “wow many”.
More the junk we are creating more is the pollution contributed not just to the digital space but also to other factors of the habitat. More data means more servers, more machines — more plastic! Data is good — but only useful data because only useful data can contribute to any machine learning model for a greater cause. There should be a mechanism that identifies useful information from useless. Of-course it cannot be just AI and automation that makes a decision again purely based on the quantity. There has to be a human touch. It should be moderated by serious and quality internet users (NOT big companies). Anything and everything including this very article — if it doesn’t qualify for a good cause then it should not exist, it should vanish from the internet. No crap!
The Internet is also a form of scarce resource that should be used responsibly. That becomes evident in a critical and challenging crisis like the one we are going through. We cannot afford it to become the agent of rumors and false information. Every post that one composes or forwards has to be held responsible and accountable for what he/she produces. Technology can do that. We cannot give control to the hands of the people who are doing no good and yet consuming most of it to only create useless data. They are paying for it I know, but you cannot go and kill someone just because you bought a gun. The Internet cannot be dirty and filthy. Its time we #cleaninternet!!
