Think Flat

by George Eby Mathew, Head of Infosys Solutions Consulting, Canada

A level playing field for everyone was a distant dream twenty five years ago.  Pictures of needing a license from the Indian government to switch on a 4 band transistor radio that my father brought from overseas in 1977 are still fresh. Unlike most other people on the planet, I needed a regulatory permit to access free information.

This was not true just for free information. Subscribing to a Time magazine or Nature in those days wasn’t easy because the central bank restricted rupee convertibility. It was certainly not a level playing field for those who lived in my part of the world.

Regulatory hurdles weren’t the only bumps on the road. Not many people will remember that in the pre-internet era, many radio stations tried to create their own communities called the DXing clubs (DX stood for distance unknown). DXers were supposed to be listening posts for radio broadcasters and were nurtured to give them feedback on programming, reception, language compatibility and so on. I was a DXer for Radio Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands and the Voice of America.  This model failed because there was a time lag between what listeners fed back to the broadcasters (usually by snail mail) and acknowledgement received from them. Often teenage DXers like me were disappointed because it took as much as three weeks to get acknowledged.

Today however, being part of an internet community is quite a different and fulfilling experience given its zero lag interactivity that creates a sense of belonging and camaraderie between people who share common interests but don’t eat the same food or even live in the same time zones.

Accessing information and being able to interact with anyone else on the planet was a big flattener in my world as it is in yours. Each individual would have at least a handful of examples to recount how his or her world flattened when access and interactivity became a leveler to one’s otherwise bumpy and walled worlds.