Cultural and Technological Convergence Bibliography

Being an Indian, I would like to discuss about the cultural as well as technological convergence in India. Basically, each and every Indian have a vision that they want India to be one of the top developed countries in the world within the year 2020. They call it “Vision 2020”. I also wish to quote the lines of Dr. Abdul Kalam

“A developed India by 2020 or even earlier is not a dream. It need not be a mere vision in the minds of the people. It is a mission we can all take up and succeed”.

Each and every individual along with the government is working hard to make India a developed country as per its current vision. I would also like  to discuss about both how India was earlier along with how it is now.

http://www.indiavision2020.org/whatis_2020.html 

The above link tells us about what Vision 2020 is all about, that is development mainly in 5 major departments – Agriculture and food processing, Infrastructure with quality and reliable electric power, Education and healthcare, Information and communication technology and at last Critical technology and strategy industries. Looking at this on the other hand, we can know how poor India was on all these things and how it is the present situation with the advanced technologies. We can also know whether the technological convergence is helping people achieve this vision easily or diverting people away from it to a position where it becomes unreachable.

Firstly, people used to communicate their information only through post and if there is an emergency then they must go directly to the person in order to convey it. Then, there was also no television earlier and newspapers were the only source of medium for people in those days to gather information. Even after the introduction of television there was only one channel and which had fixed schedules as only for news, movie songs, general information. If you want to watch a movie you must go to the theatre in those days that are called “Tentkottai” to watch where you must sit on the floor in the mud to see the movie and so people rarely prefer to go for a movie. Because of this they did not prefer to spend more time in entertainment and always kept on working for the development of the country. India was a poor country, but not to forget it had more natural wealth than any other country in the world. This was the way how India was before computers were introduced.

                                        

                                Image taken from : http://www.flickr.com/photos/ayakwns/with/4552381681/

In the current situation 2011, with the development in the science and technology and all other electronic equipments people started to be more like multi-skilled personalities as for instance, if you look at a teenager now he texts his friends from his mobile phone and listens to songs from his Ipod and also watches a video in his system and also e-mails and does all these things at the same time. We can also say that it has become a part of an improved standard of living. Now a days we have these Direct to home DTH which offers more than 300 channels with most of them not having any information that is useful in anyways but in High Definition. Along with this now a days we also have many multiplex which offers more comfort and facilities for people to watch a movie and if you are too lazy to go, the internet now a days provides everything u want and hence it is now even possible to watch an entire movie in the internet sitting in your room.

Moreover, everything is turning out to be in our hands as mobile phones and it is now as simple as that as these mobile devices tries to give access to everything we want through internet facility in it and we also don’t want to sit in front of the computer. Even though India is competing with the world now with the latest technologies, I personally think that now a days we are becoming slaves to machines and moreover it makes us really lazy to work as internet gives you whatever you need. Most people now don’t really want to go even to shopping as they buy it through the online shopping system this is possible mainly because of the technological convergence. Because of this the effort to achieve Vision 2020 is also reducing slowly as no one tries to input their own ideas and blindly follow the technology and work accordingly.

I also shared this information just to show how development in technology helps a country not only to raise its position globally upwards but also at the same time results in the downfall of hard working people. Because this advanced technology even makes hard working people become lazy and there will slowly come a period where we don’t even have to use our brains as everything will be fed electronically to us in the near future.

Role of Social Media in India

As we are currently in the modern and digitalised world, no one can live without internet. I would like to share some useful information, which gives us an clear idea about what is the current situation of social media in India. India has a population of over 1.17 Billion. India is also ranked second after China in terms of population. Can anyone Guess how much importance do people give for social media and how many hours do people averagely spend in the social networking internet websites perday ? Well I am sure it is a lot more than you expect. Have a look at the image below which gives you a clear picture of the question asked earlier ?

Image Source : http://www.internetmarketingjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/social-media-india-2.0011.png

This gives a clear picture and as I said earlier you can see there are 52 Million active internet users in India in the year 2009. There are 20 Million Indians who use internet everyday. They spend most of their time in social networking websites such as Orkut, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and so on. As this survey was done two years back now we can say that Orkut in India has become more outdated as facebook has more users than orkut and hence there has also talk that facebook was likely to buy orkut but still they have not given any official announced regarding that issue because, in 2009 Orkut had more users than facebook and so they did not want to be taken over by facebook. But currently in 2011 I am pretty much confident that the number of users of facebook has crossed over 10 Million in India.

As we can see a dramatic change in the increase in number of people using these social networking websites daily, the IT companies started to feel the pressure and hence decided to ban the usage of social media at work. They thought this will help the employees to concertrate more in the work that they do rather just getting diverted because of these social networking websites. To be exact, almost 96% of IT companies in India have banned the use of these social networking websites at work time. This has led to a slight fall in the number of people using social networking websites in India.

But this is not the downfall of social media in India, as social media is emerging with a new trend and different dimensions day-by-day  it attracts more people towards it. Now a days, children at the age of 5 are taught how to use computers in schools which helps them very well in exploring the world when they are growning up. These social networking websities lay as a strong platform for these children not only for their future but also to be in touch with the current world around them. Hence, these children are brought in such a way but once when they start to work, they are literally forced not to spend time in these social media websites.

When we look the other side of it, we can also see an increase in number of people using internet for educational search, general information search as well as to listen and watch music/video. I believe only this gives them a vast knowlegde and understanding rather than just books and lectures. To conclude with, I am quite sure that even though there are some drawbacks in India in using these social media it will standout itselves and improve more and will also increase as the years come by.