An Indian Study
Dr. Navin Kumar
Associate Professor in Psychology
Bhim Rao Ambedkar College
University of Delhi
Email – navinbrac@yahoo.co.in
navinbrac@gmail.com
Blog – http://navinbrac.blogspot.in
Introduction
Recent years have witnessed plethora of research in the area of self and its impact on various mental and behavioural processes. The way people conceptualize self and represent it often influences the behaviour and quality of life. This paper proposes to examine following research questions-
i. How people use technology as a means of self-regulation in the everyday life.
ii. How use of a particular medium of communication like internet has empowering or misery impact on individuals and society.
iii. Are users new mode of communication has led to enhancement in the quality of life.
The internet in everyday life is a landscape for thought and actions that has evolved in past few decades and a developing country like India it has taken strong roots of inter-connectedness with the people. People nowadays are organizing their everyday life activities with the use of internet. People of different socio-economic, demographic and cultural categories are organizing their everyday life activities such as shopping, banking, travelling, studying and socializing to name a few. Everyday life has both kind of potential boredom and stress at one end and authenticity, vitality and growth at the other. According to Henri Lefebvre “Everyday life is profoundly to all activities and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts, it is their meeting place, their land, their common ground. And it is in the everyday life that the sum total relations which make the human and every human being a whole takes its shape and its form.’’ (1991-p97). The dynamics of our everyday activities also result into long term indicators of self-efficacy, happiness or complexity. The larger social, political and cultural context also influences the micro-sociology of our living of everyday life. It is the rhythm of everyday life expectations and its fulfilment that it helps us build psych-efficacy or suppress it by huge gap in expectations and its fulfilment because instrumental rationalization, commoditisation and bureaucratic power can’t fully suppress the impulses of human desire, sociality, hope and creativity everyday life will always harbour “the buds and shoots of new potentialities.”(Bakhtin, 1984,p73, quoted Gardiner, p20). How this use of internet blend and shape with our daily life and its impact on self efficacy and empowerment of individuals requires a critical understanding. Critical reflexivity is required to understand the complexity of contradiction of emancipator as well as misery aspects of impact generated by internet interaction. Internet has became a predominant mode of communication including doing valuable school and college assignments, movies and music, romantic activity, learning, performing household chores. Emails, internet, chat sessions, social networking sites have occupied a major share of the communication process adopted by the users of various demographic backgrounds. How internet use affects the lives, well-being, self efficacy, interpersonal communication, linguistic competence, social identity and relationships of its users have occupied the mainstream space in the Indian context. The American psychologist declared the internet to be a “social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being”. [Kraut etal 1998]. How the actual social involvement in community activities have gone down resulting into feelings of loneliness and alienation and in same situation internet use has also resulted in increased social participation and positive social activity. Thus a kind of paradoxical generalization goes on from the vantage point of internet users and a strong opposition and negative generalization by those who do not advocate its use. It is imperative to understand its functional features depending on different ways of using would bring about widely divergent consequences. Has new medium replaced the old medium of television can’t be answered so easily. One can find differential use patterns among users to meet their needs and people are interested in old and new mediums to get satisfaction for a particular type of content. It is also presenting a generational gap among its users. Teenagers and youth seem to have become specific user category, more frequent chatting with representatives of the opposite gender giving them a sense of belonging to a group in crafting their own social networks. It has also been found in recent time that internet application also provides a platform to those who used the internet for civic purposes tended to become more actively involved in their community activity and while those who used the internet heavily but for other purposes remained relatively disconnected from community activities. In recent past online users organized several protests at unprecedented speed which also brought important legislations for the prevention of crime against women. In similar such protests electronic communications established strong ties with the people from far-flung areas of the country for putting pressure on the government to bring effective bill to curb corruption. Hampton and Wellman(2003) concluded that the presence of high speed internet in the community did not weaken or radically transform ties. Few important research questions that deserve the attention of researchers in this area include exploring new technology role as enabler to perform our activities. People trying to explore this new technology try to accomplish the goals that were not possible in the preceding state of technology. How these new technologies impact the self efficacy of an individual terms of achieving life opportunities. How these technologies go beyond the level of individuals and lead an impact on social and organizational realms.
A major turn in the enquiry of such subjects is required to uncover how individuals of different generations are making sense of and integrating its applications into their lives. Actor’s choice of choosing a particular medium also deserves greater attention to approach this as a process reality. This way of viewing the process aligns interpretative research on internet in everyday life with the social construction of technology perspective [pinch and biker, 1984, biker 1995 and law, 1992, biker, 2001] which traces the origins and evolution of technical devices to the choices made by various group of social actors. Many authors also talk about co-construction between users and technologies [oudshoorn and pinch 2003]. Thus experiences of everyday life and long term changes in larger social worlds do not remain unchanged with the arrival of new technologies. The users of new technology have different impacts due to its entry to a different temporal stage in the life of a person. For example teenagers and youth of this generation organize their life worlds as when they wake up in the morning which was not so to the previous generation of people. The advocates of media domestication technology organized their projects conceptually and methodologically (Haddon 2004, Berker etal 2005). How messages in the public world produced through internet blend with the private life of a person and with the moral economy of the household should be basis of investigation.
Analyzing the impact areas of internet communication language-
Electronically mediated communications encompass increasing use of abbreviations, acronyms and emotions. Internet messaging youth and teenagers communicate large volumes of abbreviations (e.g. ya-see you) acronyms (lol-laughing out loud) emotions (e.g. Smiley face)
Are children and young adults who use abbreviations and texts also employing the same language that requires more formal style?
Language change is often a valuable mirror on social transformation. The use of prepositions while ending sentences, using who instead of whom is not taken serious deviation in grammatical sense. The distinction between affect and effect or between its and it’s is being obliterated review of literature
. This has led to a trend of using whatever attitude an indifference to the need for consistency in linguistic usage also known as linguistic whateverism [Baron, 2008, chapter8] human language premise of rule of governed behaviour is being challenged. To be a native speaker of language is to know the rules [e.g. how to form new words, how to combine words into sentences, how to pronounce things]. Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar refers to knowledge of such rules as “linguistic competence” [Chomsky 1965) an important research question to ponder is that of growing sense of uncertainly what the rules are along with attitude the decision are least important.
Another important research question relates to the challenges of written culture with the increasing shift to digital linguistic informality. Specific conventions of vocabulary, grammar and notation of an author’s ownership over his or her text are also at stake. Alphabetic writing did not develop Greece until the eight and the seventh century BC, and it has been suggested that the alphabet enabled Greeks to lay out their thoughts Unambi Guansly [Havelock 1963]. The motivation to save money and time has become a prominent feature of modern life clock. Two prominent drivers of this theory of doing everything faster are Frederic W. Taylor and Henry Ford.
Increase in text production and encouraging motivation connect to broader audiences and a variety of texts available to us as readers.
But proliferation of writing often done in haste and vast quantity of written works at our fingertips has also led to “flooding the scriptorium”.
Does the abundance of good thing relate to our proficiency building?
If e-mail more or less entirely replaced the old fashioned letter, the culture as a whole will end up with a deficit, it will have lost in quality whatever it has gained in quantity (Eriksen, 2001 p59)
Educational establishments and educationists are at a loss with the altitudinal shift in the current generation of students who want to learn everything online from visual imagery, collaboratively rather than individually limited to chapters rather than entire book. Any assignment for which online references are not available on google search it is difficult to organize debate on such topics. Students are missing the context by which meanings to the online texts have been provided. Writers of all ilks from students teachers often simply revise the same document file as they work on a manuscript leaving no trace of earlier drafts. The early drafts of manuscripts by novelists poets or short story to trace their literary journey is often irretrievable.
Following Research Questions are important
1. How people use technology as a mean of self-regulation in the everyday life.
2. How use of a particular medium of communication like internet has empowering or misery impact on individuals and society.
3. Are users new mode of communication has led to enhancement in the quality of life.
4. Analyzing the impact areas of internet communication language-
5. Another important research question relates to the challenges of written culture with the increasing shift to digital linguistic informality
6. Language being an important component of self expression has empowering or limiting impact on the individual.
7. Is internet becoming an empowering mechanism, moving the lives of ordinary people better or is it leading to a divide across generations, gender and background.
Internet also helps members of developing countries accelerate the pace of development and an opportunity to improve growth prospects. Some of key issues upon which the internet supported social movements are based include “democracy, popular sovereignty, control over natural resources, human rights and the environment (Johnson & Laxer 2003 p62). The internet has been seen as a tool that “facilitates civil society activities by offering new possibilities for citizen participation” (yang, 2003, p406).
Narratives on internet and economic development are divided into two categories of optimists and pessimists.
Online health information has brought revolutionary changes in positive health care. It is not only information about health care but it also becomes a tool for patients and recovery processes.
In understanding what Gidden’s (1991) called the “project of self” children and young people are experiencing internet as a valued new place for social exploration and self expressions (Hollway and Valentine 2003). Young people innovate, interact, integrate and engage with each other through mediated communication.
It is an undeniable fact of recent age that in one way or another everyone is affected by the ubiquity of new online technologies and it has resulted into the blurring of distinctive social practices of information, entertainment, work and leisure, public and private, even childhood and adulthood. There are issues related to safety and security of childhood especially peers networking that has drawn academics and policy attention.
It is utopian to talk of present age without use of internet.
It would be pertinent to examine legitimate and resourceful use of internet for communicating, learning, participating, playing, connecting and so on.
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