How do people who have never surfed the Net perceive it?
"I suppose people send messages to each other. But how they do it is a mystery to me." Nishtha Agarwal, a housewife, is one of the dwindling few who have heard of the Internet but have no clue what it is all about. To her, the Net means chatting and emailing at office.
"I do feel curious sometimes, but don't ask for fear I'll be laughed at. My life is centered around my husband and kids, so I am not really interested." She has no idea that the Net can be used to keep in touch with family and friends. For her, it is a tool to be used at the workplace.
Isn't it strange, we sometimes make assumptions about things and deprive ourselves of their uses.
Sujatha Cardoza says, "I've personally never used the Net, but I have heard my son and daughter talking about things like email, chat and such. The other day when my daughter was telling me about her chat friend, she was surprised to know I understood what she meant by typing a 'smile'. Actually, I had seen something like it in an ad for Rediff Bol."
Sujatha also relates watching a horror programme on TV where she picked up a few more hints. A serial killer on the loose used a unique method to single out victims. He befriended them on the Net and lured them into his trap. "The killer would type something and it would show on the girl's screen. Then she would type and it would show on his. It looked so simple but I would never have imagined it," she smiles.
Praveen Patil, owner of a cyber café, admits, "We do have visitors who are totally blank about the Net. Some think that chatting is the same as telephonic conversation. Some think that when you send a mail, the other person has to be present at some other computer terminal. Some also think that computers are connected with some special wires that help make such communication possible."
Then there's Santosh Purohit. As a site supervisor in a small construction company, he does not really need the Net for his work, and apart from work, he cares about little else. When asked about emailing, he says, "Till a while back I used to think you send a message from a computer and a person at the other end receives it on paper. A friend told me that that was more like 'fax' and in emails no paper was involved."
Ashok Bane, assistant librarian at the Xavier Institute of Communications, feels that an email is a one-line message that one sends and receives through a computer. "When I first heard about the Net, I thought it had something to do with computers, but didn't know that it was also an information resource. Recently I learnt that I could find details of books in the American library, British Council, etc from the Net. "
Anisha Kulkarni says, "I have now learned about the Net, but previously I used to think it was an advanced computer language. I feel pretty stupid now."
But perhaps it is more stupid not to ask questions when you do not have answers.
"I knew that chatting required the physical presence of another person, but I was confused as to how one becomes aware of the other person's presence," says Margaret Vaz. In other words, she did not know there were signals to tell if a person was 'online' or 'offline'.
Sheetal sheepishly remembers that she thought of the World Wide Web as some giant international organisation, with a large number of members who regularly interacted with each other. "When I read about how the Web encouraged porn I actually thought that it could be one of those shadowy organizations," she giggles.
For those who are still pretty much clueless about what the Net is all about, these resources could help: