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Life without email
HAVING to live offline when every one in your social and work circles seems to be living in cyberspace is a new king of angst. It is very hard to perceive life offline particularly for those who have started taking internet for granted.
Like any one else, internet for me has been an easier way to obtain information, work, socialize or spend my leisure time, if I ever have any. It was a shortcut to so many things. Then all of a sudden I am once again thrown into digital Dark Age. This happened when I was assigned a project in an industrial concern near Pattoki. The project site where I am working these days is located only 1.5 kilometres from Karachi-Peshawar National Highway in the rural hinterland of Punjab. It is an industrial hub and the PTCL landlines are there. Pattoki town that has a claim to an international fame due to flower nurseries already can boast of the Internet service. But what surprised me was that it is not possible to connect to internet and go online just about 20 kilometres outside the town.
The Industrial concern I am associated with is forward-looking and heavily dependent on information technology (IT). There is a separate IT department and most of the functions and processes are performed through computers. But at the end of each day, data (inventory updates, delivery orders, laboratory text reports of products, administrative orders, pay rolls and many other things) are transferred to head office located in Lahore through pin drives and CD ROMs via a special vehicle.
Next day, the pin drives and CD ROMs come back from head office after reconciliation with the database there and IT people and computer operators on both ends keep clearing points all day. They keep faxing print copies of templates and spread sheets both ways. I was surprised to see the amount of data transfer and novel ways of making IT work for them. Industry really needs an internet access. Any body listening in this din?
On inquiry, I found out that this big industrial group is alive to the situation and has been trying to get internet access all along. But internet does not seem to be working due to poor quality of cables used for the telephone lines.
"We have tried every thing possible. You get connected alright but then you get disconnected when trying to open any site," said a computer enthusiast technical manager, Wasif Mangat.
Ijaz Ahmad, a young IT manager dreams, "It will make life very easy if we can go online. But I cannot see that happening any soon."
All others I happened to talk to in the area also expressed that they badly need internet to help them run their businesses smoothly and get advantages of real time communication.
But this is not about exposing the official claim of providing Internet services in the country or usability of existing infrastructure nor is this about the IT needs of the industry. It is about me. Like young generation, I did not grow up with internet. Acquiring necessary skills and hooking online when internet necessitated changes in job specifications and descriptions as well as in societal norms was a major shift in my life.
Past few years, I have been working and depending heavily on internet. Checking my emails many times a day and firing off relies, visiting a few websites and blogs, simultaneously, I might add, sneaking a look on others' blogs — and perusing some comments on my own blogs “as they happen” was part of my work. I did this all while toggling between other offline things I had to do. Some would call this multi-tasking and my friends would probably call it procrastination. Then came a sudden change and now I am stationed in an industrial area without internet.
Like other services I too had started taking internet for granted. What to talk of living without it, any interruption, short or long, was highly frustrating and annoying. Working with words all my life, email especially suited me as a communications medium, allowing almost instant response and queries. The new situation has provided me an opportunity to think about the important role of email in my life for the first time.
Imagine this: My email address is published at many places in print as well as online publications on the vast World Wide Web and draws enough emails — an avalanche of my own creation — to keep me busy. Whenever I write something (that I think is) "revolutionary," provocative or controversial, next morning my email inboxes are overflowing with comments (call it feedback) from readers, spam and every thing else that comes with emails notwithstanding.
Emails, whatever the substance, were a necessary part of life for me, a big boast to my ego. I felt encouraged, read, wanted. But the emails only keep coming as long as you keep responding. Now when I am unable to write more regularly and reply promptly, the fan emails is already decreasing. Only a few members of the old guard have written and asked, "What happened." Up front, life without the usual barrage of pampering emails seems a little empty.
It is the case with e-friends. Those who are using Gmail (1000GB webmail service by Google, presently in test phase) know that all emails can be kept intact in the huge Inbox without any need to delete to keep under limit. When I look at the emails stacked one above the other in my big Gmail inbox, it gives me an idea of the pattern I have been following unknowingly. E-friends are made frequently but they fade away equally frequently.
There is an equilibrium point between the virtual and real life though it is getting difficult to point out where that point is. Life offline is difficult for those who have placed every thing online. But life can be enriching for those who can take control and can adjust to any situation as it comes on or offline.
The writer
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