Almost half the online population, estimated to be about 300 million people, surfs the Internet in their native or national language. India is too in the IT revolution. With four million Indians owning personal computers many with Internet accounts the stage is set for a quantum jump in exploiting information technology.
Gates said that he had certainly not lost his faith in the long-term promise of technology to deliver a better world. But he had lost much of the faith he once had, that global capitalism would prove capable of solving the most immediate problems facing the worlds poorest people, especially the 40,000 deaths a day from preventable diseases.
Research during the past 30 years shows little evidence to suggest that the use of computers, multi-media machines, Internet, word- processing, spreadsheets and other popular applications by students has had any impact on academic standards. Amongst the things which computers are adversely affecting is language. Linguistic perfection is increasingly becoming the Holy rail, at least for gloomy educators, who predict that electronic communication will be the end of the linguistic civilization as we know it. E-mail, with its plethora of abbreviations and symbols which are meant to speed up the communication process and keep transmission costs low, is accused of perverting a whole generation. Young people, it seems, prefer to key in such legendary salutations as cya, gr8 and mte, instead of the tediously long versions see you, great and my thoughts exactly. The phrases generated by the computer age, tend to be more sardonic and pejorative. The acronym kiss means keep it simple stupid and ego surfing alludes to Internet searches for ones own name. As collections of slang readily attest, geek- speak conjures up a chilly utilitarian world in which people are equated to machines and Darwinism rules.
Evil does not have a moral connotation in cyberland but indicates something sufficiently maldesigned as not to be worth the bother of stealing with. Ponas are persons of no account and newspapers and magazines are tree ware. Geek-speak are flush with disparaging references to the real world and flesh-and-blood human beings. For all its love of puns, the high-tech world is heart a cruel and unforgiving place ruled by the merciless dynamics of the market place.
