COVER STORY
42 OUTLOOK 22 July 2019
ment exchange” were how you landed jobs. “I
remember an ad appeared in The Hindu about
vacancies in Otis back in 1987. I had cut that out,
typed out my CV and application, and posted
them.” Sounds like a period movie already?
Employment News was on Fridays, to-let ads
helped you find a home...Sebi, who loves to
keep himself updated with technology, some-
times gets nostalgic and doesn’t mind going
back to a Google-less era. Did it have an inner
coherence of some sort, a world that was the
way it should be...only partly known, only
partly knowable, inherently mysterious? Is that
why someone quipped, laconically, “We don’t
know God, but Google.”XCEPT, Nietzsche isn’t around to
proclaim “Google is dead” yet. Out in
the greens of the JNU campus, some of
the old ways of voyaging through the
world survive. “When it comes to JNU, it’s still
the lib rary,” says head librarian Manorama
Tripathi. “Be it the 1980s or now, the library is
always full.” Googling isn’t any sort of replace-
ment for serious research; it can at best be a
facilitator. Her 50-year-old, nine-storey library
works like Google, open 24x7. Free WiFi via
Google across 400+ railway stations, the poor
Indian getting rich on data, and being turned into
data themselves, could be some kind of
technocratic uto...heck, what’s that word? OFor many of us who can remember
the world before Google, the past
two decades have gone by at break
neck speed, changing much about
the human experience. There are
still billions of people who have not
yet experienced the internet, but
their numbers are rapidly shrinking.
To younger millennials or denizens
of the population cohort after that,
Generation Z, who grew up in the
postGoogle paradigm, anecdotes
about life earlier can sound quaint.
When I first became an MP in 2000,
for instance, preparing for a speech
involved submitting a written query
on the topic to the parliament lib
rary. Several days later, a thick sheaf
of papers would come back with
everything they could dig up from
their archives and hundreds of publi
cations. Browsing through that file
would be cumbersome, with no links
to click for something related. More
often than not, the exercise would
be futile, for even then parliamen
tary disruptions were commonplace.
Within a few years, I stopped dis
turbing the diligent librarian’s assis
tants, as gradually researching
topics online became a viable alter
native for those who were comforta
ble using the new technology.
Smartphones, mobile internet and
maps have brought about other big
changes. Long before Uber and Ola
became household names in urban
India, Google maps became the
goto app for early adopters of
technology to find their way around
town. I remember being amazed at
being able to do away with the rig
marole of planning ahead to get to
an appointment, guesstimating the
traffic, and sometimes sending
someone ahead to help guide me
and save time.
The ability to find all kinds of
information on a whim is fun, butthe ways it has impacted our lives
is profound. Take emails—the need
to be organised, to arrange corre
spondence in a manner that it can
be referred to in the future, has
undergone a sea change. The ability
to search through thousands of old
messages in a millisecond has lifted
a huge burden off those for whom
organising is a chore.
But, as with everything else in
life, there is no free lunch. The
privacy we voluntarily surrender to
avail these services means Google
and its peers often know more
about us than we do ourselves. Tho
ugh many online marketing offers
can irritate, there are plenty that
cause us to at least pause and look,
and sometimes be thrilled. Crun
ching of big data by global tech giants
to figure out our individual needs,
wants and weaknesses has given
them godlike powers. It is worth pon
dering the costs and benefits, and
the road ahead for society. OBaijayant Panda, Politician