Ali Sethi is the author of The Wish Maker, 2009

WHEN I was growing up in Lahore in the 1990s, it was not possible for me to think of myself as connected to people I didn’t know personally. There were the children at school and the children of servants who worked at my house. Those who I saw in films and on television shows I thought I knew intimately, but the only interaction I had with them was through pictures and interviews in Sunday newspapers and tattered secondhand magazines.

I was barely in my teens when I heard about an important new development. A family friend visiting from the States asked me, “Do you know about the web?” He was styling his hair in the bathroom mirror while we smoked a cigarette together.

“I don’t …” I replied.

He made a startled face. “You haven’t heard about the web? It’s worldwide. Connects everything on the planet.”

I pictured it: a neon-blue network of knots — something like a company logo that used to appear in television ads of the time. I assumed it was another of those astounding scientific breakthroughs that would go into the Guinness World Records yet have no impact on the running of my life.

But a few months later a boy in my class asked: “What’s your nick?”

With a smirk I told him I didn’t have one. The smirk was important: it made it sound like I didn’t care for a nick either.

Staring at my face, he leaned across his desk and said: “I don’t believe it. You’ve never chatted on the net!”

What followed was that within the month I had my own computer — it was a stained white IBM desktop that had been dragged out of my father’s office. With nervous excitement I followed the instructions I had gathered from different boys at school: I typed one nonsensical command after another. And very soon I had entered a chat room.

My first nick was Soota420 which I later changed to Stylebhai.

The Internet expanded my world considerably. It allowed me to “connect” with people who went to schools and colleges far from mine. I went to concerts and plays I had read about on the net and used chat rooms to advertise my own shows. I learned about drugs, alcohol and sex on the Internet.

I used the Internet to get into a college in the US. It was 2002 when I finally went. The Americans I met there were amused to discover that I was intensely familiar with scattered bits of their world. I hadn’t lived in America; I only felt “connected” to the place because of the movies, television shows and songs I had picked up while living in Lahore. I was also amused (in a whole other way) to find that my American college friends had no idea of their country’s long and messy involvement in my country’s affairs. I told them about the American financing the Afghan Mujahideen. They didn’t believe me. “Is there evidence of that?” they would ask, only mildly curious. (This was Bush’s America.) And I could only point to a few books in the library to support my outlandish-sounding claim.

Within a few years, however, it was possible to “post” this kind of information on a website called Wikipedia. I remember seeing it for the first time and wondering who controlled the write-ups. I was amazed to learn that the information came from multiple contributors — even I could contribute a fun fact! The more the net grew the more accurate profiles of people, things, events and even theories become.

When I came home that summer I saw mobile phones everywhere. There were also many new television channels. While I drove around Lahore, I followed new voices on the radio channels: there were so many listeners, song dedications and text messages.

Today we take connectivity for granted, though a quick look at its role in the last few years of human history is a lesson in social transformation: the lawyers’ movement of 2007 was carried out as much on Pakistan’s electronic media as it was on the streets; the terror of last year’s floods was mitigated everywhere by the use of mobile phones. The part played by Twitter and Facebook in igniting the Arab revolutions of this year is already known to us — connected once again to our Arab brethren through 24-hour news cycles and minute-by-minute updates.

A few days ago I was listening to a Mehdi Hassan ghazal on YouTube: it was an old black-and-white video that some Pakistani in Toronto had uploaded onto his music channel. The comments below were from Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis: “We are one people!”, “I feel like I am back in my house in Karachi”, “Our music transcends our boundaries!”, “Love and peace to all my brothers and sisters who love our great music...”

This is the story of my generation: the story of connectivity and its wholly new possibilities.