Tech-No-Logic

Congrats Moneycontrol.com on 10 glorious years. I don't know why Vidya (for those of you who don't know, she's the head honcho at MC) asked me to write this column. I know very little about technology, the internet, fancy gizmos and I know nothing of the newest rage - the facebook and twitter rage.

Now, before you laugh and call me names (if you must, I prefer 'non-geek' or 'tech un-savvy') please remember that I belong to a generation of journalists who grew up in a non-Google world. Imagine that! A non-Google world! In my youth, email was a luxury, search engines non-existent (at least in the TV18 office then) and Google, a funny sounding word.

We did our research the good ol' fashioned way. Called companies, faxed requests and met managements one-on-one to get information. Cameras were bulky, tapes the size of law books and technology all analog. Satellite time was expensive and limited and it was impossible to feed stories between cities, forget countries.

Life was slow, not very efficient and yet we were happy. Stories were painstakingly crafted, each line pondered over, each shot carefully selected. Quantity never ranked above quality. Today's world is a study in contrast. Everything is nano, super-fast, super-efficient, super-assembly-line. More is good, whether or not that more is truly good. More stories pieced together in less minutes, more shows, and more television channels. More internet connectivity, more online, more friends in the virtual world than in the real one. More chatter, less meaningful conversation. More information, less knowledge. More quantity, less quality.

Now don't get me wrong. Of course, I'm grateful for Google. And email. And my blackberry. And my pre-3G iphone. But I'm not sure any of this has made me a better journalist or a better person. The trouble with technology today is that it's become less medium and more message - No longer the journey but instead the destination.

My colleague Anuradha just started tweeting. She sits about 15 feet away from me at work. If I follow her on twitter, I could go days without talking to her and yet know what she's up to. That's strange living!

I spend more time on my blackberry than with my mother. My phone rings through the day, I often eat lunch while emailing and the commute to work is spent typing away on the laptop. Roads look familiar but I often don't know where I am because I rarely look out of the car window anymore (who has time to gaze!). This year Diwali greetings were conveyed efficiently via email, I've become too lazy to call even friends. And to think technology was meant to bridge distances, close the gap. Like the title of this piece suggests, this method has only madness. Think for a moment about what would happen if all those millions of people on facebook woke up one day to find some bug had deleted all their 'friends' lists. Would they have no friends?

PS: I wrote this piece at 5am on my blackberry. Sleep deprived but tempted to finish as much work as I could. Had to submit this piece or else Vidya would have given me an old-fashioned earful in person the next time she was in my hood. Or a cold stare. Can't delete either without reading, like I would do to an undesirable email. If only she was more the facebook kind! Then you wouldn't have had to suffer this column.

The author, Menaka Doshi is the Corporate Editor of CNBC-TV18.