How quaint, how quaint.
Reading through my own posts in the pasts, some of the questions that I asked remain unanswered, while the solutions to most have a magical way of revealing themselves in time.I genuinely felt like patting myself in the back when I realised how I've truly (hopefully?) learnt to let go of some things; gone are the emotion-filled reactions of yesteryear, but what remained were bits and pieces of objectivity, inquisitiveness and logic that have come to define me over the years.
In our short span on the face of this Earth, what can we achieve?
As I step into my prime within a couple of years, that shall be the theme of my life for the coming decade.
Our generation grew up as digital migrants; infants in the use of technology.
We fumbled at maintaining relationships online, like careless children and their fragile new toys. We did not know that the internet was a double-edged sword as it was, and still is. We thought it was the all-enabling tool, and overlooked any of its shortcomings. Indeed it was such a tool, allowing us to do things that our grandparents' generation would have passed off as impossibilities, or further, signs of insanity. Little did we know that it took away the artistry that was called for in communication of old, such as in letter-writing.
Back then, if you had penned something mistakenly in ink, you would have wasted valuable parchment and ink, and even more so, your valuable time. This made authors put so much more thought before penning their thoughts and sending or publishing it.
As the use of computers pervaded our lives first through MS-DOS when we were in Primary School, we discovered the ease of correcting your mistakes in electronic form, and consequently thoughtful words gradually lost their purpose.
Years later, as we stepped into the era of IRC & ICQ in our early Secondary School years, we learnt that we could always re-type our thoughts if they were misinterpreted in any way, with barely any consequence. As a result, we, almost naturally, learnt how not to spend any effort or thought when typing out a sentence in an electronic format, naively believing that any mistakes or misinterpretations could always be corrected immediately thereafter.
Immature as we were, when we migrated these habits onto a new platform in weblogs, we did not realize that unlike a chat interface, it was a platform of publication, where words were relatively static, remained for a relatively long period of time, and were open to misinterpretations with virtually no recourse as it was a one-directional medium. The reader consumed the words and, if unhappy, could choose never to express his or her unhappiness. This created misunderstandings, and coupled with the lack of immediate bi-directional communication, allowed misunderstandings to grow unchecked and unnoticed by all, only to fester into monsters in our individual hearts that do not emerge until years after.
Little did we know that at such an age where we were growing up, that these monsters came at an extremely bad time when we could be influenced by them - and over many years, they gradually define who we are; and the people who made the mistakes have no way of correcting them; such is the danger of careless words in digital publication.
I wish we all had known, but who could have known?
We must not forget that the internet was as new to our parents as it was to us.
We fell, and we fell really hard. Which, fortunately, also gives us the knowledge, however painful, to teach our next generation how to do things better than we did.
Perhaps the best thing we can do, is to educate our younger peers who are going through their formative years, of the pitfalls of online communication; and even more so, ensure that our next generation is able to appreciate all of these even before they enter their teenage years.
Perhaps, they will then have the wisdom to be better people than we could ever have been.
Perhaps, perhaps.
Until next time.
K'
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