Do we think when we upload or download?

 Posted on December 20, 2010

Do we think when we upload or download?
This is the time of the year when messages fly across the web in millions of little pieces.
If my download speed (my subscription payment) is 56 bytes at least 4-6 bytes are taken by the header and we do not get 100% efficiency.

Up time is even worse.

I find only the twitter restricting its characters to 140 (out of 256 alphanumerical code) and the English keyboard has about 36 keys to play with.

Pali has many and Sinhala has little less since our phonetics are as close as to the nature since the ancient dialogue in the East  is as old as its existence and the English keyboard cannot accommodate our language characteristics used for phonetics with the 36 English keys.

My question is our intelligence restricted by our keyboard (or touch-pad for that matter)?

Touch-pad is very innovative and the S.M.S may be fast in the character transfer in the web but both do not fit into our analog way of life.

We cannot transfer our Thinking and Creativity over the web.

I saw one of my friend’s grandson playing with an electronic “kitty” at a function where everybody was there and the kids were the ones. a vee bit neglected  (adults were fully occupied and preoccupied).

To my amazement the kid’s use of the binocular vision was affected by the little electronic “kitty”.

I did a bit of testing of his eyes (I have befriended him on an earlier occasion) and after 20 minutes of testing I was not sure what was going on.

Is his eyesight defective?

Is the game too fast or difficult?  

The kiddy could not figure out how to win.  

He was so engrossed that I could not get a word out of his mouth.

The next morning we had early morning chat with the guys of my age who had not returned to their bases. 

This was a rare occasion I decided to stay back to attend the next day’s function (many others did not).

One grandad told me that his grandchild had his earphones fixed to his ears from Colombo to Matara and never bothered to listen to anything outside let alone birds singing.

I told him if his grandson becomes a doctor one day he want be able to hear soft heart sounds or crackles in the lung and get it fixed / (corrected) now, not before it is too, late.

On a slightly more frightful context radiation from the cell phones might end up with an epidemic of soft brain tumours in a decade or so especially in our girls, and that would be covered up like coconut saga (disputed heart attacks) by the big powerful companies until they shift to another venture.

Eyes, Ears and Brain can be affected.

What next?

Fingers too with touch-pad.

But none of these gadgets will help creative thinking.
All these gadgets when excessively used hamper children’s creativity!
We cannot transfer our thinking and creativity over the web.
Only connectivity.
Thinking has to be done (fast too) before touching the pads or keys but most of these actions are reflex actions and nobody seems to be reflective in their approach.
Think at least once what the benefits the kid gets (age appropriate games) out of the gadget and what hidden harmful effects are there before you buy it, including choking with the tiny battery.

That is the point I am driving at in this short piece.

Going back to up-time and down-time we need to educate the users, what ever the material they transfer across the web make them very light (quality does not matter) as possible to get the maximum throughput (MP3 or 4 instead of the fully featured family video) so the friend who downloads it will benefit and bystander users will also have enough bandwidth for their work and a very fast internet for everybody.

Follow the trend of twitter which sends millions of messages across with only 140 characters.

In that sense this blogging is on the Gorilla (sized) side but my intention is not to send a message but to make creative thinking possible even in this electronic age.

What we enjoy is analyzing the facts of the message.
That is the food for thought toady.