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Food, Clothing, Shelter and the Internet!
By Phil/Kords | Published | No Comments
Word Count: 670
Time to read: 2 min 40 sec
The three necessities of life are food, clothing and shelter. We now have a fourth necessity to accompany them – the Internet! The Internet has placed itself in a dominant position as a fundamental right to express, order, assimilate, disseminate, transmit, influence and even connect.
With this blog, I wish to highlight the evolution, the necessities and why the Internet dominates them all.
Food: in the earlier times when food was scarce, people had to forage, hunt and grow their food. Food security was a huge problem then. There were raiders and wars would often lay them to waste. The Scorched Earth policy (though not widely adopted by then kingdoms and governments), multiplied the scarcity hundredfold.
We need food in any form to survive. If you are a vegetarian, eggiterian (yes, it sounds precisely what you are thinking), non-vegetarian or a vegan – food is present in the fresh or processed form to consume. However, those who cannot afford it every time are designated to be poor and homeless.
Poverty alleviation is a nice term that sets goals to offer the most basic of this necessity. The best way according to me to alleviate poverty is to offer opportunity. Education and talents are a few means for tackling it.
Education opens the doors to gain employment. For the latter, making it conspicuous is the challenge. Resources, if present, can make it easier to achieve that. I digress.
Clothing: It comes in two forms – people who wish to cover themselves and people who like to dress better.
Clothing may be something that cost a little more than food. Those who can afford to clothe don’t care much about looking best as long as it is presentable. There are a few people who don’t even care to look presentable!
It is not just what you wear matters. How you carry yourself well in that outfit is what matters. Two Indian celebrities come to my mind: Bipasha Basu and Malaika Arora-Khan.
The shelter: The best place to enjoy food and stay clothed is under a roof. It quite obvious when this achievement reflects the best of your ability to provide for yourself and your dependents.
I wish to cover the Internet more since it is a vast topic to cover in this post.
Internet in India and elsewhere initially needed a dial-up modem to connect. It used a standard phone line to connect. People born in the 80s would know. The way it connected to the internet was unique. The sound is very nostalgic.
The earlier times saw the net being slow due to the lower speed. Using the dial-up modem required another device similar to the cable modem you see now.
One major disadvantage of the dial-up modem was since it used the standard telephone line – your phone line must be free or you needed a dedicated phone line to connect.
Second, it increased your phone bill.
Third, if you use your existing single phone line, any incoming call will cause your connection to the net to disconnect or the incoming call would not come through. In any case, the speed was slower than a snail’s pace! Didn’t expect it to rhyme though!
Fast forward to the present day, cable net or broadband cable has made things easier. Not to mention the addition of the smartphone revolution, going online is much easier and does not need a pc. This is one of the reasons why the internet has spread so rapidly around the world.
Earlier, you needed a PC to surf the internet. It was not portable. With the smartphone, portability is easy.
In today’s world, one cannot imagine life without the net. Happenings on any part of the globe can reach instantly to the other side. All you need is a device like a smartphone or a pc.
Technologists are trying to centre everything in the smartphone making it a multi-purpose controller. You should take a closer look at the Internet-of-things (IoT) that explores this possibility in much detail.
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