If I am living in an Indian metropolis and want to communicate with a person at the other end of the city, I can of course opt to spend three hours in physically getting across to him, and another three hours in getting back in the name of keeping my humanness alive, but if you ask me, that would be a very unintelligent thing to do. How much better it would be to just send him an email!
On the other hand, let us suppose I want to communicate with my next-door neighbour. Of course, granting that he is available, my first choice would be to ring his doorbell and speak to him. So would anybody else’s I know. Are there any people who would rather communicate through the computer?
Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that there are. Perhaps they are very shy or timid people, or people with complexes or other psychological disorders. Perhaps the circumstances are such that they feel that face-to-face or even telephonic contact with that particular neighbour will exacerbate an already-existing problem, like a quarrel. How would communicating with a computer here stand vis-a-vis face-to-face contact?
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In such an instance, there would be no communication at all were there no computers; but when they are available, they provide the necessary distancing, as it were, to make communication possible. Paradoxical as it may appear, it is this ‘distancing’ that effectively pulls down the barriers between people who would otherwise have remained mutually isolated when it was important for them to hear one another out. So here too, we might say, the computer helps to solve a problem in human communication rather than create one.
Like they say, one can’t teach old dog new tricks. As we grow into adulthood, our egos harden. If we are socially competent by then, well and good; if not, it is unlikely any more that we will grow adept at it. That being that, it would be wrong to denigrate the use of computers even in the event that an adult prefers it to face-to- face contact. Besides, the many well-documented cases of people bonding over the Internet seem to give the lie to the allegedly dehumanising effects of computer interaction.
Where children are concerned, the matter may be somewhat different. Children who spend much more time alone with the computer at the expense of interacting with their family, friends or neighbours, may fall behind in social development.
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The modern world is one in which, willy-nilly, a good deal of work may be needed to be done before a computer screen. To my mind, this phenomenon has helped society rather than placed it in a crisis so far as the process of socialization and human interaction is concerned. If there are risks in relation to the computer, they are probably of a different nature, as for instance the possible long-term effects of computer radiation on human health, and the misuse of computer communication by unscrupulous elements in society.