Caught in the Net

Yesterday, my friend shared a YouTube clip of a girl recited a poem on the relationship between her mom and face book. I grinned towards the end when she said that the mother was so attached to the face book since early in the morning and she will be with her face book till to heaven. That was how the little girl perceived the world of net through face book...maybe that was the best way to express her loneliness and frustrations when all the parent's attention had been devoted to the net instead of her...

I believe that this little girl is not alone, a lot more people out there including myself feel the same. The cyberspace has successfully invaded our lives and robbed the most precious and important thing to us that is "time". We hardly have time to do anything except engross ourselves in the cyberspace...

In fact Allah had reminded us on the important of "time" through "Surah Al 'Ashr". Thus, wish to share a very good and interesting article by Peter Preston on cyberspace.

It's rather like cursing in church or copulating on the Queen's lawn. No good opinions, I know, will come of it. But how do you start your digital week? With junk, with spam, with a standard crop of 58 e-mail messages offering to "energise my baby-maker", prevent "death by swine flu", and dispense "scintillating orgasms" to all and sundry. Welcome to the 21st century, and a great deal of what we hate about it. Impotence, disease, frustration.

And such starts do not get better. Just sit down and consider the most dire dishes of the day. Shall we obsessively discuss the death of newspapers, the end of five centuries of print? Or may be we could ponder the demise of books, a bonfire of our literary heritage turned to ashes? There's porn and paedophilia, of course, giant helpings of fear and disgust on demand. There's terrorism and the latest sinister warnings from Osama and Co. The end of civilised life as we know it.

Whatever happened to community? Walk any high street and you'll see the shutters coming down. Remember the ghosts of Woolworths past and sniffle nostalgia. Traditional, human Britain is closing for business - just like a globe where bank failures spread like viruses and viruses spread like bank failures. Will leaders arise to rescue and inspire us afresh?

This is surely the way the world really ends: not with a bang, but with surges of nausea amid mounting heat, rising seas and carbon despair. Can mankind somehow be saved? Well, we could always switch the damned computer off.

For the Net we work on, the digital connections our government now seeks to spread as a universal right, the keyboards in our studies and living rooms, are blights as well as boons, misery-makers as well as enablers. We won't automatically be better with no books to finger and caress : or shops to sell them. Amazoned of existence. We aren't better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street, or Obama twittering away when he could be thinking instead. Before there were computer disks to steal from fees office, there was privacy., secrecy and supposed decency undisturbed. It becomes increasingly necessary to weigh the revolution that has changed all our lives on an updated set of moral scales.

Let's not pretend there isn't problem. Let's acknowledge, in the words of one highly experienced processor designer, that there is indeed " a possibility that computer equipment power consumption spiralling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet". Let's get the real challenge out in the open.

Walk or bike to work instead of getting out the car? Of course. Learn the complex routines for recycling bins? Hopefully. Think before leaving on the next jet plane? Naturally. But what's the use of worrying and wondering about a wilting world when Susan Boyle videos by the zillion are clogging up YouTube, when life is a deluge of puerile twitters and bilious blogs?

I know the Net is a wonder beyond compare. I work on it for hours every day. I can't be without it (via laptop, BlackBerry or iPhone).

But I'm also glumly aware that it brings despond in its train, that much of what irks us most is digital cause and effect. Discuss? No, we don't want to know. Just like the blogger who won't think about electricity demand because "Oh, yawn!...it's government's job to supply that demand" - just like spammers with scintillating orgasms for sale.