Death of Originality.
“What Adiga lifts the lid on is also inexorably true: not a single detail in this novel rings false or feels confected. The White Tiger is an excoriating piece of work, stripping away the veneer of “India Rising”. I was in no mood to read the article further. The big bold line beneath India Rising was an eyesore. My views about the author were quashed. He isn’t a genius, but just someone whom I call an “ASSEMBLER”. For people who aren’t familiar with my lingo, an “ASSEMBLER” is the one who has reduced the dignified QWERTY keyboard to a 3 button device-ctrl, c and v. These are the ones who simply want to cheat or save themselves from some effort, instead of learning how to form their own views and opinions. Personal expressions are totally lost. Its not that a certain section of people are following this practice, but a whole generation as turned to this easy form to copying. This is what I call the “DEATH OF ORIGINALITY”.
The birth of this trend can be traced back to a portal we all know – GOOGLE. Everyone knows about the advantages of Google. But only a few are aware about the downsides associated with Googling. The ctrl c and ctrl v generation can called ad the biggest drawback of Google. A couple of years when Google shot to prominence, everybody talked about Google and its plus points. However no one anticipated the present scenario, not even its founders.
The copy paste phenomenon has taken the world by storm. It’s experienced everywhere from college assignments to office reports. But why is that we are unable to bring out the originality within us? There are some theories which are making the round.
Ever since Google made its debut, people have become addicted to the easy information available at their fingertips. The good ol’ library is seldom visited. People these days are showing less interest in creative work and more interested in looking at other people’s work. Ask a sixth standard student to write an essay and the first thing he will do is, he will open a Navneet Lower level essay book and blindly start copying from it.
People are now shying away from effort. They have become what I call as “Text Jockeys”. Type the keyword in the text box, skim through the first few pages, copy a few lines from here ,copy some text from there and there you go , your report is ready. Information is like a vast ocean instead of scuba diving, we prefer jet skiing over it. Along with the loss of our creativeness there is also a poor understanding of information needs among the “Copy – Paste” generation. We are finding it difficult to develop effective search strategies and exhibit a strong preference for natural languages search rather than just analyzing which key words might be more effective. Understanding search results is also problematic, it is difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance of them. Not only is the Internet full of unreliable information but some of those duffers are cutting-and-pasting it into their essays without even removing the web advertising materials. As Nicholos Carr says in his book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the world, From Edison to Google, Google is making us stupid.
Well, there are plenty o optimists who disagree with Mr. Carr. They feel that we should adapt to the problem rather than solving it. They say should we call ourselves ’stupid’ because cars made us forget how to walk far distance? Should we call ourselves “stupid” because we have forgotten how to take care of ourselves and rely on doctor? Should we call ourselves “stupid” because we listen to digital music instead of analog music and no longer know how to appreciate sound? Well I don’t quite agree with them. Adapting to a problem is no way of solving it. However, I am not in favor of Mr. Carr as well. The problem is not Google, the problem lies in our mind. We are getting too much dependent on technology for our comfort. Technology used within its limits is very advantageous. However we tend to breach this thin boundary thereby making less self reliant.
As the Internet expands my leaps and bounds, I don’t feel the situation will improve. Unless people realize the gravity of the issue and resurrect the originality deep within them.
---Atul Barapatre
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