This evening as I sat at the office at 11:30 PM at night (not unusual for me by any means), I was doing atleast about half a dozen things at the same time… I was composing a document for work, chatting with a co-worker on ICQ, chatting with my mother on Yahoo! Messenger, talking with Karenika and another friend on AIM and at the same time also surfing the web and writing up the previous blog entry. And while I did all of that at once, it was a just an amazing feeling to realize that ALL of that… every single one of them was only possible because of the power of the Web.

Yes, it’s cliched to say the Net changes everything…. but for me and for ALL of those people who have grown up with the Net and especially the generation after ours for whom the Net has always been there… it’s a complete paradigm shift. The social impact of the Net is probably orders of magnitude more profound than anything anyone could dream up of in “e-commerce”, “b-2-b” or <insert buzzword-compliant word from e-high-tech jargon dictionary here>.

Socially, the Net has caused changes which we didn’t even imagine or forsee. IM’ing is a huge one. I still don’t believe that the full potential of IM’ing has been realized to date. As I write this, I’m concurrently holding conversations with people in New Delhi, New York, Boston and Pittsburgh…. all at once. And my mind, like the minds of several others out there and especially the newer generation, implicitly understands the concept of “threading” conversations, i.e. holding multiple conversations at once, while maintaing the state in each individual one. The ability of the mind to multi-process has become a heck of a lot more commonplace than our parents and grandparents could ever imagine.

Information access… I talk to people from different countries and different cultures everyday. There are cultural references which are now resolves in under seconds… My friend in Boston used a reference in our discussion this eveing which was alien to me… but within seconds, I was on a page which explained it. (Did I mention that Google rocks 🙂 ) I truly cannot imagine what people did in the days without google! Last week, as I was writing code, I made the same remark to a co-worker, “how the heck did people write code without google!?”

I know that Carnegie Mellon, my alma mater, has a reputation for being about as geeky as geeky can get (It was recently again named “Most Wired” – which is somewhat ironic, since the reason CMU was named most wired is because it is really the most unwired since CMU has the single largest installation of a wireless network – you can literally take your notebook and walk anywhere on campus and be on the Net all the time.) So my being from CMU and and interacting with primarily CMU folks doesn’t give the upcoming observation a very un-biased sample set…. but… Even in something as basic as dating, the Net generation doesn’t think of getting phone numbers… they thing of getting an email address or an IM id.

I’m sur there are enough people doing their Ph.Ds in examing the social impacts of the Web and I really didn’t write this to steal any of their thunder… but I truly do believe that of everything the Net is credited for, its role in reshaping society and culture as we knew it is probably not given its due credit.

In the days after the aftermath of September 11th, the thing that bothered me the most and what I wrote about was that suicide attacks essentially changes the entire dynamics of dealing with hijackings, hostage situations and virtually any threat. Thus far, the assumption has always beent hat the prepetrators atleast fear death and want to get themselves out alive and therefore that gives us a few means of trying to analyze a situation. But when people lose respect for life and they have nothing more to lose, then it changes the rules of the game.

My mom forwarded me this news story this evening: Suicide attack in J&K assembly kills 29. If you look at the story and see the picture of the car that was used in the attack… a Tata Sumo is about as big as a Land Cruiser (okay, definitely yuckier than a Land Cruiser, but dimension wise that would give you an idea). This is precisely what is scary… the fact that there will be more lunatics who will make belief their weapon (see my previous diatribe on this in the archives).

I think the best illustration of how this changes the rules of the game is in this story where a United Airlines pilot delivered a pre-flight speech in which he instructed passengers how to overpower any hijackers that might be aboard. An article on Salon.com – Experts urge airline passengers to fight that was linked to the story also put it well:

The take-charge approach is a shift in decades-long attitudes by both pilots and passengers that cooperation is the best approach for dealing with hijackers.

But that belief “was based on the fundamental premise that the hijackers are rational human beings and want to live,” said Raleigh Truitt, a pilot who heads his own aviation consulting firm in New Jersey.

“When you’re on an airplane and it’s controlled by people who are … bent on destroying themselves and others,” he said, “the reaction has to be different.”

Be it a plane, a car bomb, a shooting spree, biological weapons, chemical weapons or any other form of action that causes harm to innocent people… what is really the recourse against such brainwashing and complete loss of sensibility? Is there any?