MINDCASTING!!

Before you people get any weird thoughts, let me explain that by the word ‘mindcasting’, I’m not referring to process of attaching a sensor device into the brain to study the brain wave pattern like in EEG and all. No, this is not a technical article. I’m referring to a fad that has taken over us in the recent times. A fun, which has become a craze, and which is slowly turning into an obsession.

Mindcasting: v. Practice of posting messages that reflect one’s current thoughts, ideas etc on to the internet.

Over the past few years, broadcasting intimate details of one’s life has become mainstream. Blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking, Orkutting are the order of the day. Many of us are sharing indeed at least some details of our life. The culture has caught up so fast among us, the urban Indians that it’s like we need to regularly update our status in order to affirm our identities. These social networking sites provide us with our own page, exclusively dedicated to ourselves. You may want to call it your profile, your wall, your dashboard.. anything. Splash your ideas, your passions, your intellectual interests and other things into this exclusive page of yours. Reflect yourself here. Today it’s like if you don’t have an account on any of these networking sites, you don’t exist.

Unlike our parent’s generation, our source of entertainment has shifted radically from watching celebrities in an idiot box to promoting ourselves onto the clouds. I’m flickering, uploading my edited pictures into the net for the world to see and comment. But of course, I’ll let only those pictures for them to see what I want them to see and how I want them to see. I’m you-tubing, making my short videos and promoting for the world to watch. And yes, there is the twitter, which has taken over the world by storm (Try not to get addicted!!). We are blogging, sharing day to day happening of our life, the way we perceived it. We are talking about artistic expressions, empowerment and all that, sure is true for some but for most of us, it validate our existence.

The power of this media is magnanimous. I share myself, comment on other’s posts, pictures etc, analyze present political scenarios, chat with likeminded people whom I’ve not even seen, on politics, religion and even sex. I can openly shout out for a cause and before I know it, I may have thousands of supporters in there. I can comment on Aishwarya Rai’s wardrobe (and Abhishek Bachchan’s luck ;)), on anything, on everything. You are king of that world, unless of course someone reports abuse and you are scratched by the site itself.

Moreover, it has shrunk our world. Although I’ve not seen any of my school friends for about past three years, we still hang around almost everyday (in the clouds, of course). We still have long chats on nothing, we still call each other names. We are never out of touch. Only thing I miss are the physical brawls we people occasionally indulge in.

If the power is great, so is the rate of obsession. Here’s a status update of one of my friend on facebook “whoa! inside exm hall, Q paper in my hand. Don’t know a crap!!!’. Now!!! I wonder, where’d he got that courage to access his facebook right during the exam. Another one I know, doesn’t have an active college life. But he’s so happening in the virtual world that one would mistake him for Salman Khan with all the buzz, scraps, scribbles, comments surrounding his profile. He really seems to be living his second life in there. There’s another one who promotes herself as a weirdo with all the weird pictures of her, totally shocking status updates and all. It’s not that she is one, but it’s like she just want to be one. Huh! If not in real world, be what you want to be in this world for sure.

These websites offer the adventure of befriending someone totally random. It’s fun, I got to agree. It’s all good, until you are in your safe zone. The recent incident of murder of a seventeen year old from sub-urban Mumbai is an eye opener. This guy blindly trusted his “friend”, who lured him to have fun, then had him kidnapped somewhere in outskirts of Mumbai, asked his family for a ransom and then killed him during a struggle. That was a disturbing incident.

Adding to all these buzz, a new trend is soon catching up. Those people call it Lifestreaming. You are on the internet ‘live’, for the world to see. Unlike you tube where you release already edited videos, or unlike personal chatting through webcams. These sites offer you to completely go on the net ‘live’, chat with fellow life streamers, interrupt each other. It is like as being under surveillance camera. People are increasingly turning their lives into digital peep shows. Weird, eh? Now I realize, how does T.V channels get never ending casts for their embarrassing reality shows.

The fact is we are increasingly becoming obsessed with ourselves thanks to these sites. Unlike updating our lives, we are living to update. We have become increasingly addicted to being observed by the world. We are beaming our streams, our tweets, photos, status updates to our hundreds of “friends” and thousands of “followers” who in turn are busy broadcasting their own lives to tune in. It’s a mass phenomenon. However no matter what, there will be, of course, one permanent visitor to our profile always and that will be, ourselves.

Now, if you would excuse me, I got to go online. I might want to update my status on facebook that I’d just finished my article for the college magazine. ~~Keep rocking!! :-)