With a plethora of Social media tools now available and with it now being a mainstream mode of real media communication in our country, a lot of questions arise. The most important one is “What does it mean for the general population of India?”

Its a known fact that the Indian IT Industry does not permit access to social media at workplace.This is treated to be a waste of time and viewed as contributor to drop in employee productivity. This is a bit weird since the tech industry itself feels technology can be left out in the whole game.The most happening innovations that catch public attention are today happening on the web and this is bound to make a big difference to our lives. A thought that lingers is “Does that mean that in a world of  dot net and java programming, maturity models and  best practices are we shielding access to some ideas that are changing the way we connect?” This is something that the Indian IT Industry must really seriously look into.

India has skipped an entire generation of tech revolution, computers never really became mainstream and out of nowhere mobiles took over, directly sans the regular curve of tech upgradation that other countries experienced. With mobile apps being developed at breathtaking speed does the availability of social media in cheap mobiles augur well for the digital divide? Perhaps social media and mobile phones can mean a lot, digital divide may well have a very different connotation from what we have today.

However there is  a lot that needs to be done. Particularly in bridging the gap between research, innovation and the common man. We only have 3-4% of the country on the internet and having said that social media users are not in the best of settings, it is in their homes, in the nights, after work that they come up to their online abodes.

For the common man we need to do just one simple thing “Share”

As we march ahead we need to be more aware, informed and awakened, it is the past generation that needs care, they need to be handhold to embrace new technologies. Today an illiterate mother can see her software engineer son in U.S everyday, something we always dreamt of. We as sons and daughters must let our mother and other mothers know exactly how. We need to get IT to these needy people. We the youth have so much more to give back to the society, if only we can pick some people from the gone by generation or the coming generation and help them maximize their life with these tools.

This is not to say that people of our age have equal access to technology. Its just a gut feeling that they will be there sooner or later, we are just accelerating their speed so that they catch up soon.Tech revolution this time is a sweeping one and will not miss a lot of people. The  only barrier is the cost. Imagine What would happen if govt frees broadband usage in India? What do you think Post your comments