Stop Downloading, Start Uploading*

Stop Downloading, Start Uploading
—Jay Bradner.

Welcome to twitter era, where people largely emote in terms of tweets! Unlike great old works like poetry, literature, dramas etc tweets don’t have the luxury of attaining permanence in hard bound print forms for eternity, but they rather choose to stay as short little yet powerful words, wandering in the Internet, just showing up themselves when someone looks for them.

Did I mention powerful?! I did it because, tweets are the way we generally think. Ranging from pain to pleasure, we often wind up the message in less than 140 characters. Not convinced…?
Touch something hot?..Ouch!
Want to express love?…I love you..
Dismay/astonishment?..OMG
Every other feeling including the ones above?…Fuck..

So not astonishingly, every now and then great works of intellects are born in tweets and fade with timelines. One such tweet was “Stop Downloading, Start Uploading”.

This was a message from Jay to the high school students at graduation. I would say what a statement of vision. Internet is a mechanism truly democratic, it is populated by the people, for the people, and is presently of the people! and all that what we call constitutes Internet oops… (I sound like an obsolete techie now!) Web 2.0 today is the culmination of the data (uploads) by the people, who were/are mostly from the developed countries, who were lucky enough to have decent Internet access, at a very early point of time. Ours is a developing country, and our optic fibres are progressively carrying more and more data everyday, seems like a good sign to me!

With all this discussion on “Stop dowloading, Start uploading”, it is worthwhile to see throught the right spectacles, what the early Internet access and uploading phenomenon helped these developed nations achieve.

The greatest thing is about the data in Internet is not just data in itself. It is a culture uploaded. A subtle form of soft-power establishment. British council through its libraries worldwide, wields it soft-power by establishing cultural relations. We all speak English, eat American, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese range of foods, prefer French wines, trust German engineering, Indian software services! etc. All this constitutes judicious use of soft-power, advertently or inadvertently. So, essentially what we see in Internet is what they show us, which is actually that which they want us to see! I mentioned “inadvertently” already, I don’t mean to say all this is done deliberately, it just happened and is happening, and all that I am calling for is to see the huge benefit that can emerge out of practicing a simple thing from now on, the benefit of which will arrive as a geometric progression, in simple terms -exponentially. After-all, in Internet, information is contagious!

So what can we do?
It is a must that we accept that India as a nation has its own problems, ranging from poverty to corruption, there are lots of people who still need to be fed, there is a huge mass that needs to be vaccinated to fight diseases of the future and an equal mass that needs to be educated to fight the social/cultural diseases that will come up in the future. All the above problems, need to be addressed with careful, diplomatic plannings, often requiring political intervention and will. So that very much distances techies like you and me from these issues!

So, what can WE do.

By WE, I here mean the privileged few like you and me, who have access to Internet, who have email addresses, who communicate ceaselessly with our devices. We can’t touch lives, we can’t change rules by which our nation runs, but we definitely can break all these barriers and utilize this medium called Internet which is very easy and which is so much our playground.

My dream is an extrapolation of Jay Bradner’s Vision. My dream is..

Every school student, college graduate has a blog, or better, a website for himself.

To tweet the emotions, to come up with good emotions, don’t forget that we are uploading cultures!

Colleges and companies should have a place in the forms asking for personal websites and blogs, just the way we have mobile numbers now, I don’t think that was there two decades ago.

Students start giving links to their blogs and websites in their resumes, enabling their persona to break the confines of a boring black and white resume, just the way they want to break the confines of a dull, unchallenging job.

The up-loaders should provide appropriate tags, as the Web 2.0 loves tagging, for managing itself. Oblige and Web shall love you too!

A name like Simon, John, Smith, Jason is so very close to Internet, you see these filled in by default in the text boxes intended for filling in your names. Why not Krish, Raghav, Ram etc!?! Provided we think more than providing just software making and maintaining services, and come up with more original home grown ideas which the Web 2.0 would love to accommodate, or better celebrate.

How can we do?

Q:How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.
—from "Eat That Frog" by Brian Tracy.

Start with one upload per day, minimum being a tweet, maximum being a video of some fun or serious activity of the day.
Upload options: esnips, plinky, twitter, scribd, stumbleupon, facebook, tumblr blog, wordpress, bloglines, linkedin, etc…in simple terms…HAVE A FACE IN INTERNET. An entire population of a country like India, into Internet, filling it…see the potential?

How can we do?
You think upon that…! and add a comment. I will be commenting my ideas as well. Looking forward to your bright ideas. Trust me, I will Execute them!