We are not narcissists; we connect

I have been lucky to have witnessed two cultural revolutions. One was the advent of personal mobile phones and the other was the march of internet. You can actually say that they are one and the same i.e. increasing connectivity. But they have led an entire generation towards a cultural change and the jury is yet to be out whether it is good or bad (The cultural change not the connectivity).

There were the simple old times when you mocked anybody who had a pen-pal or anybody who developed a face-book (Yes, it was actually called a face-book with fluffy designer paper spirally bound, on which your friends scribbled what they thought of you). In today's world, if you dont have a Facebook (F for the online forum) page, it may not be far-fetched for others to brand you as a pervert loner. And if you have a blog, active or inactive, then even better for your social status. And yet, what is a blog if not an interface allowing multiple pen-friendships!

There are so many ways that this revolution impacts an ordinary man like me but most important of all, it allows me to hold multiple conversations and it allows me to talk to that aspect of a personality that I like. Let's talk a bit about this.

Every one of us has multiple aspects to our personalities. In acute cases, its scizophrenia while in moderate cases, it is called having a multi-faceted personality. In fact, in most of us, those aspects, sometimes, are so different from each other, that you could call them multiple mini-personalities attached to the same person. Now how would you talk to a person in the old world? You would likely talk to him/her in person and you would be talking to all those multiple personalities together and still you can have only one conversation at a time. Some people would call that a waste. Worse still, what if you had an argument with, say, your brother over cricket? You would simply not talk to him for weeks, not just on cricket, but on everything else. So many laughters that would go unheard, so many memories that would not be collected, so many triumphs that would not be witnessed.

In comes the connected world which offers you the ability to hold multiple concurrent conversations with the same person. You are talking to her about a book on your blog, about Arabic numerals on his blog or a picture on her Facebook profile or simply amused at his comical status message. The best part is that you get to choose which aspect of his/her personality do you want to engage in a conversation. You dont like photography, simply avoid her albums. You like his writing, pay him a compliment or better still expound upon his theories. It is almost an unwritten law that the other person will respond only on the subject you engaged them on. It is almost like that particular mini-personality has been turned on while others are put to sleep. This could be so much better as opposed to dinner-time conversations where things could go a little out of hand, at times.

To top it, all these conversations can happen at the same time. It is almost as if when you are engaged in one conversation, you forget that you have just been delivered an insult at another forum by the same person. You had a fight with your brother over cricinfo, no worries; you can still continue to play scrabulous with him on Facebook.

Despite such positives, I still prefer the simple old world where you deal with a multi-dimensional person and not with his two-dimensional cross-sections. But I would have to give in that the connectivity has definitely enhanced my experience.