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| Source: http://www.everythingusb.com/gsou-anti-peep-usb-webcam-18902.html |
Any student who travels abroad for his/her education would resonate this feeling of living through a webcam. If you consider how culture and traditions have been modified to fit into the contemporary nature of our present lifestyle, it seems rather not that great of a change to move away from your home town into a foreign land and pursue your dreams. This however does not come without a price. We miss out on all those weddings, engagements, newly born baby, birthday parties etc. Is it that, we don't like these people whose functions you couldn't attend? of course not. Is it that we don't like these customs and traditions. Why have we adopted living far away in a distant land seems to be a question that a lot of students/non-resident have in mind.
We have all been harnessing our little vasco dagama inside of us. We have been the non-conformists by doing things as and when we like and whenever we feel like it. The beneficial thing of living away from your birth place, you appreciate your home town a lot more. More importantly we realize why we left our home town, we just felt like it. When you really think how did it all start, when did you start pursuing your career to live abroad. It usually starts with people who were looking for something in the place where they lived and couldnt find it, or wanted to go elsewhere and see if the standards were the same. In either cases, people were not content and thats the beginning. Having said that, they don't forget all the true values of their home town, be it customs, religion, traditions and rituals. They carry it along with them to their new found land. They also add their own touch to each of these customs and traditions and make it their own. So we are fully aware of what we want and thats why we pursue. This is possibly why most of us felt a huge loss when we heard the news that Steve Jobs has left this world. Very few leaders in the world stands to represent all the misfits and weirdos.
It is because of innovators like him and so many others who had worked to make the horizon come closer. Now things have changed so much so that even doctors, therapists have resorted to their practices by consulting with their patients through skype. Skype has become such an integral part of our lives that we use it for professional and personal reasons. Right from having daily conversations with your folks in far away home land, meetings with collaborators and colleagues, skype has been omnipresent to the extent people has used it for online engagements, showing the newly born to the grand parents. Although the price of such moments is priceless, i began to think can we adopt living through a webcam? is it really popular? does it have the emotional appeal?
Lets say you are about to go on a vacation, you look up the place, check out the local tourist attractions, places to dine, activities to do. Obviously you can get all of these details with fully rendered images from google but that doesnt in anyway mean we had a vacation till we experience it. Or better yet, you might have so many friends in the social media, we share important events in our lives, wish each other for our birthdays, but till we meet our friends in person and share our wishes with our relatives, we will always feel distant. Life can be written as a story starting from our birth, school life, college, job, marriage, kids, growing them up ...grand kids,.. etc. Unless we experience it and live it through our own lenses and feel it through our receptors, it will not have the soul that life could offer.
By this, i dont intend to belittle the contribution of technology in our lives. Everything in moderation is applicable even in this field and when technology is put to use in appropriate areas and for daily events makes our communication with our loved ones in the far distant lands easy and not so distant. As a matter of fact, this is what i sincerely recommend.
Whatsapp - available in any android, ios, blackberry smart phones and can be used wherever you have wifi (free dynamic messaging service)
The success of these applications can be traced to its common nature since they both are free and has the cross-platform support that most other applications dont have. This can be very well used in other areas in our society. Imagine when there is no language barrier and each of us can understand each other, no cultural differences, etc. By this i dont mean that there should only one universal language and one universal culture. The clarity among people to make languages and cultures to be cross-platform compatible is probably going to make a huge difference in making us feel a lot united. This would infact contribute to global peace as each culture would understand that the other culture which they thought was very different from theirs is actually very similar and peoples beliefs could be co-related. In this techno savvy generation wherein people have been thought to be hooked on to devices, we realize that the technology like facebook, twitter cater to our social needs and technology has enabled us that. Technology has understand human beings better as a matter of fact to create cross-platform interfaces to provide people with the online freedom which is almost a prerogative in every humans DNA. No wonder when Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddhafi was killed, it was not only libyans who was relieved but every other global citizen was happy for libya for its taste of freedom.
Whether it is for improvements in technology, community, society or any other field;
"Freedom" is the key ingredient in the recipe for LIFE.
