Technology and language

The  language of the people shows the era we live in. It’s a reflection of whats going on around us. Impact on current technologies on the language we speak is the strongest evidence of this. I am not talking about the different languages but the way we express ourselves. To be more precise consider the kind of analogies we pick up from IT.

I remember few years back when someone didn’t understand something immediately, the common comment could be, “his ‘tubelight’ didn’t turn on “. Today, under similar condtions, I have heard sentences like , ‘he has got a Celeron processor’. The intrusion of IT terminology in our day to day conversation has been phenomenal especially people like me in IT industry. Lately  I had observed quite a few times that we were discussing some non-IT topic or even making jokes, and suddenly we were talking in terms of IT. I paused for a moment to think about the kind of talk and how boring would it be for a non IT person.

Few intances when such sentences hit my ear were like :

1. You can’t remember this, u got a volatile memory or RAM

2. I am not able to recall, my data server is down.

3. You should not take this much time to answer, replace ur processor.

4. I am feeling tired, time to recharge myself.

5. I wish I could undo/ ctrl+z this.

6. Ping me ( used when u r nowhere near communicator )

Some of you might say, who talks like this but I have heard such sentences and who knows may have used similar ones myself.

One of the PJ I have told sometimes is my  mother tongue is C .

There can be tons of such examples and many of you might have to share. Spare one minute and scribe down any such example u may recall or fetech from ur own data server .

And before I end this post, let me give you one more example of my point which also gave me idea to write the post. One of the nonsense gmail chat that I have all the time and I am sure all of u have at some point of time.

My Friend : You haven’t written something for a long time.

Me : All the windows of my brain have been closed.

Me : So whats going on  ?

My Friend : Nothing much.

Me : Ok, so u can write some thing too.

My Friend : All the windows and doors are closed.

Me : U r in microsoft, u just need ctrol + o

open WINDOWS , u have GATES

My Friend : nothng works , when blue screen  is in front of u

Me : blue screen with white chars

My Friend : yeh

Me : You gave me an idea to write something 

Technophobia

Technology has changed tremendously in last 10 years. The arrival of computers, internet, cellphones and other gadgest in our daily lives has changed our life styles to great extent. It is very exciting for people of my generation to see all these changes but it’s not easy for our parents and grandparents to handle the fast changing world. They are not comfortable with the new technologies becoming part of their lives and in fact they tend to have a Technophobia.

When cell phones prices went down few years back and they started becoming part of our lives, I could easily catch up and learn to use it. But it was not same for my parents and when I looked around this was the case with parents of most of the people of my generation. My father learnt to call and send sms soon but he was reluctant to learn other features that came along. My mother was reluctant to learn even that. She was happy asking us every time to make a call.

Same thing continued with computers too. My father picked up and learnt to use at least basic software but my mom was again reluctant to learn to use it. Whenever we asked her to use it, she would reply, ” Why should I learn?” It was just reversal from childhood and now we wanted her to learn everything and she was running away from studies. Later on I came to realize it’s just not happening in our home but was happening everywhere. I think there may be some ‘bright old parents’ who got expert quickly but for majority of old generation people using new gadgets like digital camera, music and dvd players, cellphones is still a nightmare.

But then we slowly understood their problems, became more patient while teaching them and started coming out with new ways of teaching. I remember when I had to explain her difference between hard disk and floppy disk storage capacity, I came up with analogy of difference between storage capacity of a bucket and a glass:). Sometimes these stupid things do work. She started to take interest and came with queries about different things. Another factor that forced her to learn was the introduction of computers in office work. It sound laughable that it took her so much time to learn but it was difficult for her for sure. Be it learning to control mouse or remembering which command does what.

My father was comfortable with using computers and learnt to use internet too but he was afraid of installing software thinking he might commit some mistake and computer will be dead. But after some encouragement and assurance that nothing incurable can happen to computer due to just installing software, he tried that first in front of me. Later on when I and my sis went away from home for our studies, he continued learning installations over phone and now hopefully he is no more afraid to do that.

I feel its my duty to get them familiar with new technologies and keep them up with changes happening aroud. It’s really fun to teach them new things and see the happiness on their faces when they learn something. I taught my father to use gtalk few months back and now he can use a few smileys while chatting with us. Our next job is to teach him some chat abbreviations like gn,btw,gtg,asap n so on. He can send emails, surf the web, chat with us and may be in few years would be designing his web page.

Today my mother can use basic cellphone features like calling,sending sms, saving phone numbers. She can use Microsoft Word and Excel’s features and play song on Winamp media player. She is curious to know about sending and receiving emails. May be one day she will code a C program of  “Hello Word” . After all life is all about crazy dreams and setting big goals.