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Another revolution sweeping across the Net is audio and video replacing the text. And, voice mail, voice chat, video mail are among the services which have come up. "Why not a global voice mail over the Internet?" This question motivated many entrepreneurs and one such company offering the voice messaging service is Navin.com. As the founder, president and CEO of the company, Godbole has said: "My mom lives in Mumbai. She is 79 years old. How do I communicate with her when English is not her native language and she doesn’t have a computer?" The telephone seems the obvious answer, but despite constant assurances that he would pay the phone bills, he could not persuade her to call often enough. For years his mother has lived in a rented apartment. A several-minute phone call from India would eat up as much a month’s rent. No matter how genuinely the son entreated, she did not call frequently enough. The concern about the cost was too firmly implanted. And, today, it is not just Navin.com, but scores of other sites offering voice-messaging service on the net. It is not even necessary to have the telephone at home to hear the voice of their loved across the seven seas. A New Delhi-based company, Thind Infotech, has introduced electronic telecom messaging service — e-telM. Messages in this service can be sent and retrieved by dialling a telephone number that is toll free. And, the service provided by this company is absolutely free to the users. Hearing the voice, seeing the photos or live video clippings of a person on the other side of the globe is no more a fantasy or a figment of imagination. Individuals can have their family album on the Web, share their happiness and sorrow with one another, even though geographically they might be in different continents. "A family album brings in the cherished memories of those happy moments frozen in time. As we settled down in life, only memories remained. While some photos were with my parents, my sisters took some and I took some," says Manisha while scanning through the old family album. Ashish Gupta and Arun Aggarwal, former McKinsey employees, have launched a site ties2family.com catering the needs of the family, to stay in touch and share their moments in the cyberspace. Manisha, who learnt about the site, says: "this is a real solution to our concerns. Now, I can see my grandson growing up in the USA." According to a study in the USA, which has the maximum number of Internet users globally, the Internet actually increases the amount of time families spend together and does not isolate children from society. The study by the National School Boards Foundation, the Children’s Television Workshop and Microsoft, found that using the Internet either had no impact on the amount of time parents and children spend together. It actually increased that time. The finding of this study, however, has contradicted a Stanford University survey that found that the Internet causes children to become more isolated from their families. While the study found that the Internet is not bad for families, the NSBF admitted that the Web world is not without its dangers. Along with the report, the foundation published a set of guidelines for Internet usage designed to mitigate against the medium’s hazards. Included in the guidelines are recommendations that parents and school officials should pay as much attention to highlighting "good content" as restricting access to inappropriate content, that parents place computers in rooms the whole family uses and that educators integrate the Internet into schoolwork. Phil Agre, an associate professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego, has observed that the Internet offers the hope of a more democratic society. By promoting a decentralised form of social mobilisation, the Internet can help us to renovate our institutions and liberate ourselves from our authoritarian legacies. The Internet does indeed hold these possibilities, but they are hardly inevitable. In order for the Internet to become a tool for social progress, not a tool of oppression or another centralised broadcast medium or simply a waste of money, concerned citizens must understand the different ways in which the Internet can become embedded in larger social processe. In thinking about culturally appropriate ways of using technologies like the Internet, the best starting-point is with people—coherent communities of people and the ways they think together, he said. |
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