YOUR birthday is supposed to be your most special day of the year. Fifth or fiftieth, every person expects friends and family to send wishes that day.
My special day came a couple of months back and this time I was in a foreign country, staying with my family. Still half of my family and my friends were back home in Pakistan. As the clock struck twelve midnight, my expectations grew higher of phone calls on my birthday, but none came. I received many wishes like every year, but still no phone call. The surprise was even my lovely parents, wished me with utmost affection but not on phone. Their mode of conveying their wishes was none other than the famous ‘email and chat’. I don’t blame them; my parting from them for a few days definitely gave them enough incentive to familiarize themselves with this new form of communication. I know that dad enjoys my email messages and mom feels innovative to ‘log on’ and chat with me. In fact I had to tell her over chat that maybe she can call let me hear the birthday wish in her pleasant voice.
I received some interesting greeting cards from one of my closest friends. She lives in the same country and is still a student. She said that like every year she didn’t call me this year because she decided to send me e-greetings that she found with a lot Web surfing!
Still the one thing that I missed the most on this day were the phone calls that I receive every year on the day. Though technologies like email and chat have brought the world closer, they are erasing the element of pure emotions, efforts in view of care and affection from our lives.
Internet, email and chat are common phenomenon of every home today. Just like my mom vividly remembers the time when the television arrived to make her life more entertaining, I can evoke the advent of the computer culture. I still remember the day, about twelve years back when my smarter brother was presented the personal computer on his birthday. For years I didn’t even know how the machine worked. Today my life would be incomplete without it. This machine surely has brought a lot of change in our lives, at home and internationally. Be it emailing wishes or networking your business, we owe it all to computers. IRC or just simply chat have became most popular among youngsters as computers invade our lives. We have read articles about how unsuspecting parents have mistaken their children’s chatting habits for ‘working at the computer’. Chatting is a fad that is still immensely popular, even some say that it has lost its charm in the past couple of years.
But the matter of the fact is that chatting has evolved and the new ‘in’ thing with it is called messenger service. This is the same concept of virtual chat, but with a different perspective. The idea is to chat with only those people, who have been added to your chatting list with your permission. They are mostly your friends and family, who can be added to your list. You get online, connect your messenger service and chat with all those who are online and connected as well. The advantage with messenger service is parents, elders and your family doesn’t have to be exposed to the whole world as is the case with IRC.
There is another picture to chat and email as well. First international call booking was your sole source of communication to find out how your loved ones are doing abroad. Now the scenario is different.
Chatting has made the cost of contact with overseas relatives and friends very low, almost all of you have your own personal computer. The new gizmo of messenger service has turned chat into something very personal. These schemes make it possible for greetings to travel through as well, which would probably stay with the well wisher due to lack of funds to make international calls. They have made possible to keep in touch with friends, who you could have easily lost touch with once they travelled abroad or to another city. The limitation stays though that you should possess a computer device and you should be computer literate. But once you have overcome this curb, the whole world is at your fingertips.
Despite all my feelings of entailing spoken wishes on my birthday, my reaction next day was sending a thank you note to everyone who had cared to wish me. My means of expressing my gratitude was none other than email and chat!
