The New Land by Paramendra Bhagat
March 9, 2000.
The New Land
by Paramendra Bhagat
March 9, 2000.
To go online and to be online. To work online and to communicate online. To store away one’s term papers and annotated bibliographies and journal entries online and never carry around any disks anymore. To witness the phase when companies put up sites that were glamorized posters. To see them move on to offer goods and offline services online. To be able to see the phase after that when it is taken for granted that people have internet access and that they spend time online. Microsoft: software. AOL Time Warner: content. Cisco: internet infrastructure.
To sign up with an online bank and access the account 24-7 like it were an e-mail account. To read tons of news, to visit the U.S. Congress online. To discover Octopus.com and realize the personal website need not be updated that often or to witness Britannica become available online for free and realize now every part of the world can boast of a library, if only there were wider internet access.
To build a website and keep building it and sign up for an e-mail service that prints a hundred business cards for you for free and all you put on it is your name, your e-mail address and your website address. If anyone gets curious, they will bother to click. And the business card will not get outdated in five years or ten: let’s do lunch.
To sign up for hotmail and then a dozen other e-mail services. To witness hotmail transform from being sold at $ 400 million with 10 million members to it claiming a full quarter of the netizens, 50 million and growing. Go Sabeer Bhatia. To have them add features. Add additional languages, a new folder that receives the porn ads and get rich quick schemes and such junk: bulk mail. It is about claiming real estate. Used to be Manhattan and Tokyo. Not any more.
To realize all the high-tech is really about high-touch. There is value added. The dignity that is enhanced. No more the minority feeling and the liberation that brings. There are brethren out there. The looming, ceaseless expansion. To really spend time with people, quality time. To do what’s got to be done and then spend time with people, lots of it. Out of the box thinking wins.
From dot com to dot com, the world of instantanaires and 15-year-olds who run companies. Commercial activity that is approaching trillions of dollars. Real time, real money. Of you kind of owning Walmart-size stores without investing a dime. Because time is the currency online. Of cyber offices, and tech stocks, of venture capital. Of Nasdaq. Of PC to PC phone calls, voice chats, and video phones, all for free. Home, sweet home. The monasteries online, or as close as they get. Movie clips, music videos. Songs from back home. Renting Hindi movies online that get dropped into your CPO. Web-publishing. Or the computers that will cost a hundred to five hundred bucks and all it will give you is internet access, for that is all you will need: to make calls, to watch TV, to surf the net, to do homework, to keep in touch, to play the stock markets, to listen to music, or rent movies. Just plug it in like TV. No need to log on even.
The netizens do pay taxes: it is the time they spend at any site. Your competition is but a click away, and hence entire companies and sectors of the cyber economy floating on banner ads. This is a dot com world, a dot com economy. It is big bang time in cyberspace. Or like when the first multi-cellular organisms emerged and sprawled.
The Internet, the New Land; America used to be it. Let’s do lunch.
