Alice Kahn once wrote, “For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three”. And the irony in this statement is depictive of the world we live in today. Almost everything we know is run by computers. Little did Isaac Asimov realize that their books that were considered visionary (and not forget, very imaginative) would find its way into our lives only two to three decades after the ‘Foundation Series’. Sabeer Bhatia, the inventor of Hotmail, really changed it all for us. Surfing didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sandy beaches in California or the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, but to do with the World Wide Web. A bazillion cyber-cafes opened up… people were online and a classmate of mine said that the only thing in the future that will be permanent is your address on the Internet. Then came the mp3 rage, where music is compressed digitally to 1/10th its size and hence could be easily transferred across the internet via mail and so on and so forth. As computers got faster, smaller and even more user friendly… the younger generation has gotten even more impatient, and some companies like Airtel in India encourage that image. From vinyl records to CDs to a mini-iPod today, technology has made remarkable advances for the benefit of music lovers. And the web has catered to that need as well. When The Dark Knight was released last year, a free copy of the movie was up for downloads within 36 hours of release. Far from the good old days when we had to wait for a letter to reach in two weeks and there was nothing you could do about it. Perhaps, you could keep the pigeon-feed ready… that’s all! Similarly, when ‘Rock On’ was released last year, the entire soundtrack within days of its release was on an embarrassingly large number of Hindi movie song download sites, with scant respect for copyright issues. Here’s a nice song from the movie called ‘Phir Dekhiye’: That’s Web 2.0 for you. Has it made our lives better by giving us everything we want at our finger tips? Or is it spoiling us to an extent where we imagine we can what we want when we want? And the answer to that is: Yes and yes. But there’s nothing wrong with wanting what we want when we want. And just like the Buggles sang: Video killed the Radio star… the internet is spreading its tentacles over television while radio is making a comeback. What goes around comes around… huh? Skype is taking over international and long distance calls…Facebook and these social sites that have become the latest offering to people who would like to network as well as stay in touch over the Internet. Keeping all this in mind, my boss once told me: I’m done with all this technology… give me a couple of cans, and I’ll be happy to use them to talk with someone else at the other end of the ‘line’. And with that, you can only conclude that the internet with all its trappings, is the thing for the next generation, whereas the rest of us aren’t necessarily ready to move on yet. But whatever makes you happy, really.