R A N D O M IV: Gen Next

I guess every generation is a next generation. At least literally it happens so. I was in my parking lot today morning and I over heard a very young boy telling his friend about some update he read on twitter. Twitter eh? The boy must be a high school going kid. And they are already twitting. ‘The Gen Next’, I said to myself.

I wonder what I used to do when I was in 9th or 10th standard. How did I update my friends? One thing for sure, it was a hell of an effort in the eyes of the school going kids today. I mean, who would want to have long telephone conversations with all the friends? You just update on twitter and voila! It is done. Hmmm, I guess I’m old enough to say the generation next has arrived. But I’m still an old traditional guy. I miss those long telephone conversations, carrying the black Sony cordless phone to the terrace so that my mother doesn’t object. I think I didn’t know what internet was as a school going kid. That was how we twitted 10-12 years back.

The internet arrived and we changed. Yahoo messenger and chat rooms became the in thing when I joined college. I remember how almost all conversations started as ‘Hi… asl?’ At least 2 visits to the internet cafes became a must. In fact I had almost tricked my dad to make an investment in starting an internet kiosk. But sadly then and thankfully now, it didnt work out. It took lot of convincing to finally get him to buy a computer at home. Then when my sister got into engineering 6 years later, the computer and the internet at home became a necessity for her. And my father didn’t wink.

Last year into our studies, we were introduced to Orkut and Gmail. The chat room fantasy had died down and the new phenomenon of scrap booking started. We started with long telephone calls on land line, my sister started with the same, but on mobile phones. And she was hooked on to Orkut for all of her engineering days. The gen next is now all over Facebook, twitter and I’m sure you will have some thing else very soon. In fact, lot f people already have their personal web space (blogs). Time will come when they will have a whole lot of stuff for themselves as well.

They say that the time keeps bettering itself. So the time will keep changing where the gen next spends their time. The physical mailers, the land line phones, the mobiles, the advent of high speed internet… what next?