I’m a Google guy. I ignore Facebook as hard as I can. Long story short: Facebook is a mess. It tries to nudge me almost all the time. From the start when I a second ago logged in to until I log out. You too probably have a Facebook account and may be you are having a great experience with it. Nothing personal but I’ve observed that things like Facebook is for those who used to spent excessive amount of time watching television and the like. Like Facebook, television seems so useful. You can watch movies, listen songs, check out news and stuff. But in reality it’s unbelievably irrelevant. Eventually, by sitting in front of the television you’ve watched what you didn’t want or needed to watch at all. We stick to technology like Facebook or Television not because its gonna be fun or its useful in my life but just for the sake of pastime. And of course they nudge you to do so. It’s not their fault, its our fault. Company are here to give what we want, not what we or they think we should have.
Of course there are people who take the first small step towards improvement even when the world is trying to nudge them to do the opposite. Companies cannot customize their products for every damn people they connect with based on their wants or needs. So it’s our responsibility to customize our life and what we do with our time. But how? By the choices we make. We shape our time by the choices we make. Their nudging affects us less than the choices we make. There’s something which comes before the act of making choices. Willingness to do something different and new from our daily routine work. The first and the smallest step in making change is a slight willingness to do it. Like when it happens after you’ve solved a lot of math problems, the solution to the next problem clicks in your mind in fraction of seconds.
I prefer using Google over Facebook even for pastime. Because of its elegant home page. When I go to Google I have a particular purpose in my mind, a task, even when I don’t know what should I search. But at least I know that I’m gonna do the task of searching whereas in applications like Facebook where I have no idea what’s worth doing. I suspect that when people log in Facebook they have little control over their activities. Facebook tell you what to do next but from inside we know that its purposeless, we are about to just waste out time.
Now some words on Technology overall. If technology is telling us what to do next we are about to either waste our time or make ourselves irrelevant or both. If technology can think (tell what should we do next) better than human and perform all the tasks in the world which is impossible for humans to do why do need humans then to make something happen. We need humans because the claim that technology knows better than us is wrong. It can provide us with data but data alone is not enough to make good decisions. Technology should be the slave of humans, not the other way around. Though, what technology cannot do is that it can’t think, feel, or dream great ideas. It can’t detect our desire, purpose, and attitude better than us.
For instance consider this. I made the decision of starting a blog. why. Not because some technology suggested me to start a blog at certain date or month if I want to gain maximum benefit. Just because technology came to know the best time to start a blog doesn’t mean that I am really gonna start a blog. This much reason is not good enough. When making decisions other thing are necessary to consider like desire, purpose, level of need and the like which technology is unaware of. Using only data while making decision is like saying ‘just because you have the money to buy a golf kit means you have to learn to play golf’. It doesn’t matter if you care about the game at all. Data matters but far less than desire and passion. Take this: just because data says that 90% of the business fail means that no one should start a business even if they care about it. You see how stupid it gets.
At last this is what I think “Technology is a friend, not a boss. So treat it that way”
shubh bhatia 