Saved From the Snares of the Internet!

A research I read recently found out that the average teenager now spends some 7 hours glued to digital devices; through iMacs and iPods and iPhones and iPads in the great North iAmerica.

Just after reading that article, I came across a story on Yahoo News about a mother who violently shook her baby because the infant’s crying was disturbing her session on Facebook. She was playing Farmville, and apparently concluded that tending to digital sheep, cows and cabbages was more important than taking care of the baby. The baby died.

Just...memories, now.

As you can see, the darn western world’s gone nuts because of the internet, and the rest of the world is quickly following in its footsteps.

It is in view of this sobering fact that our trusty monopolistic telecoms provider, Econet Wireless, decided to step in and protect us from these shocking world developments. Their method is simple: hiking internet tariffs so much as to make any decent internet surfing impractical.

For instance, a 5 Megabyte bundle of data will cost you $2, and expires the same day you purchase it; 100MB will cost you $30; 200MB costs $50 and 1Gigabyte will cost you an arm and a leg.

A friend of mine went for the $30 package for his data line; four days later, the system was crying out for more…and he hadn’t even changed his Facebook photo yet, let alone actually download anything.

Funny thing: this same company kept promising a while back that the messy digging they did all over our nice roads to lay cables would bring a faster and much cheaper internet to the ordinary Zimbabwean.

I guess they were just saying.

This kind of reminds me of the ‘Big Bang Theory’…you know, big company acting all inefficient and arrogant especially because there is no competition to keep the bully in check.

I’ve heard of two companies called Africom and Powertel, but it seems their coverage is still too minuscule to speak of. Then there is Telecel which seemed very promising (since it’s backed by a giant Egyptian company) – that is, until they postponed their 3G introduction from September 2010 (that’s last month!) to sometime next year. As for NetOne….NetOne…well, I don’t know anything about NetOne. Info, anybody?

So fellow Zimbabweans, I am pleased to announce that you are relatively safe from the corrupting influence of the internet, unless you have an awfully lot of cash to burn. There is no way you are going to be spending 7+ hours killing all of your social life through internet addiction.

You are not going to be killing your babies anytime soon either.

Postscript: Econet  has slashed its mobile internet prices. 5Mb now costs a dollar, 100Mb $20 and 200Mb is now $40. A gig will still cost you an arm and a leg though. Looking forward to more price slashes and moral corruption as the competition heats up!

In Search of the Facebook Killer!

Once upon a time I got tired of Facebook. I would log on into my account; find absolutely nothing to do, then log out. This would happen like 5 times a day, and I erroneously concluded that despite having 500 million addicts out there, Facebook had become boring.

With this mindset on, and brimming with optimism, I decided to hunt on the internet for another social networking site to waste away my days on: a Facebook killer!

I landed on MySpace, probably because it’s very popular in the US and it’s existed long before Facebook was launched. I loved it at first because it lived up to its name. I could personalize my page a lot and really turn it into…well…my space.

Then it started getting all boring and lonely out there because try as I could, I couldn’t locate any of my friends to connect with. Even sending invitations didn’t seem to help. It seemed nobody else wanted to jump ship like I did. So, I left.

Round about this time, I came across Perfspot. Now these guys seemed to address my problem beautifully. Although I couldn’t find any of my friends there, I could easily make a dozen new friends from all over the world! Flattering, indeed.
Until I discovered I had been a bit to hasty into calling these people friends. Before long, some of these ‘friends’ started displaying some very…um…questionable characteristics. Being your average conservative Zimbabwean, I couldn’t stomach some of the things they had started talking about. I wanted out.

Funny enough, Pefspot wouldn’t let me. It seems as if there is no way to deactivate a Perfspot account even after searching high and low on the internet for any answers. It seems they are so desperate for a high membership base that once they get you, they won’t let you go. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

I stumbled upon Mjoy: a mobile social networking platform originating from Germany. It also doubles up as a free texting service. I was pleasantly surprised to see an awful lot of Zimbos interacting on that platform: which helps to explain why the country’s relatively infant 3G network got congested pretty quickly.

The phone might be ugly, but the mjoy interface is nice!

Mjoy is a lot of fun…mostly because you get to txt for free to any number you like…and there aren’t a lot of things you get for free these days. Ok, there is a catch: you only txt if you have credits, and you accumulate credits by clicking through ads. Well, fair enough: as long as I don’t get to pay anything.

The problem with this site is that it is only accessible on your phone – you can’t access it from your PC. And I still don’t get why this site is overwhelmingly dominated by Nigerians. I don’t hate Nigerians, even if they are the ones who came up with the ‘African Movie’, but they do make posts in a funny, and sometimes hard to understand, type of English.

My social network search also allowed me a brief flirtation with Twitter. Twitter is very popular and I created an account with very high hopes - but it wasn’t that much fun. The whole concept of this site is to ‘follow’ certain people (get to see their Twitter updates) and to be followed by others. I couldn’t decide who to follow, and those I got to follow proved not to be all that engaging. I guess I like getting real information from my friends, and not ‘short bursts of inconsequential information’, which is what Twitter really means.

I think Twitter is for fanatics. I mean, who else would like to get trivial messages like ‘Getting out the house, hot day!’, ‘At work, boring’ or ‘Just had a hefty lunch’ on their account from anyone. I wouldn’t, even if it’s Justin Bieber I’m following. That’s just too much information.

Doubtless, I didn’t exhaust the social networking sites out there…actually, I think I didn’t even scratch the surface. But after having gotten around the world in search of the Facebook killer, I am back where I started: stuck with Facebook.

I still log on to the site, post something completely irrelevant, like a Douglas Adam quote for instance, and then log out….about 2 times a day. It does help to make the hours speed up to 5 o’clock.

What we learn from college these days

It is a well known fact the world over that graduates emerge from university as completely different creatures when compared to their counterparts who have never been in these institutions of higher learning. 
Zimbabwe is not an exception. 

Each year, thousands of beings are unleashed out into the country with radically transformed values, views, language, sense of humor…everything, actually. 
This article will discuss just four things university graduates learn these days (I don’t know if its proper to use ‘University’ or ‘College’ interchangeably, but I’m gonna do that in this article. Its fun). 
Let’s start with language.

LANGUAGE

The average college student is so hard pressed for time that it becomes most inconvenient to fully pronounce frequently used words. As a result, university talk is loaded with cryptic codes and abbreviations that would put a Microsoft programmer to shame. Students do not go ‘surfing on the internet’, for instance, they just ‘google’. So if you here someone talking about ‘Googling the Stratman and FinAc assignment before hitting the D.H’, rest assured, they are not talking space science…its just homework and food.
Thanks to the prevalence of text messaging and emails, abbreviations are now creeping into notebooks and even - God forbid - assignments. Peak into Tendai Dube’s notebook, for instance, and you are going to need the Tendai Dube's Concise Short Hand Dictionary if you want to be able to read those notes.

RESEARCH

Now this is the greatest skill that Zimbabwe’s finest learning institutions manage to impart to undergraduates. This process might seem complex and intimidating at first but really, the average student has managed to perfect this art into a few simple steps:


1) Google it
2) Copy it
3) Paste it
4) Edit


Step 1 involves searching for relevant material on the internet whether its for an assignment or a research project. Step 2 and 3 is the part where you select information from a website and paste it to your assignment/project/notes. The final task, Step 4, is supposed to involve weeding out the trash and remain with a polished product. This last step has proven to be optional in most cases.


A friend of mine managed to do his attachment project in less than a week and a half. This is a process that is supposed to take something like 6 to 8 months. He passed.

SOCIALIZING

Face to face conversation went out with the Stone Age. The 21st Century is all about calls ant txtng, emails and of course Facebook. See, the university I attended had wi-fi (I’m not explaining what that is….google it!). Everyone who had a computer, phone or other compatible device could access the internet from almost any point within the university premises. I recall an incident in which two friends of mine, separated by a 10 minute walk, opted to video chat on Skype instead. 


This is nothing, compared to the new social etiquette that allows relationships to be started online; breakups and make ups via txt messages and the like. In some bygone era, breaking up with someone was a long complicated process which involved avoiding the other for a while as a way of insinuating the fading romance; creating a negative and nasty attitude to show dislike; then finally having to make the much dreaded face to face speech usually starting with words ‘I don’t think this is working anymore…’ 


In a university situation, this would obviously take too long. Simply change your Facebook status to single. Optionally, you can then send a txt notification of the recent turn of developments.

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