Davidow outlines how overconnectivity can be lethal

Overconnected: Where to draw the line at being online
By William H Davidow
Headline/ Hachette
Pages: 240
Price: Rs 550

When I first s aw this book, I grabbed it as a possible guide to surviving my mid-life crisis, caused by having to track my office mail, Internet mail, BlackBerry messenger, Google-talk, Twitter, Facebook, and even the lowly SMS and telephone call - all at the same time. But, no, it did not tell me how to go back to those peaceful days when having a landline alone meant you were connected.

Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet - that is the real title, on the inside cover, different from the one on the jacket - says the Internet enables news and views to travel across the world at a speed that leaves very little time to absorb what is coming and react in a sane manner.

"The Internet will make our existences better only if we learn to accommodate it"

Giving a brief history of the Internet in which he compares its impact to that of the railroads in the United States back in the 19th century, author William Davidow lays out his thesis. Nations or economic regions, he says, fall into four groups: the underconnected, the interconnected, the highly connected, and the overconnected.

Davidow believes we can manage the interconnected and highly connected states - or that the damage caused in such states is not on a global scale. In this context he recalls the South Sea Company bubble of the early 18th century. But the overconnected state is a different story.

So, he says, when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, it triggered the meltdown of the banking system in faraway Iceland - an isolated nation that had embraced the Internet with gusto in the early 1990s to transit from the world of fishing to high finance in the same generation. It wiped out the savings of those who used the Internet to put their money in Iceland's banks, and brought in global recession.

There are scores of other instances of how too much of interconnectivity is bad for us. But Davidow also comes up with suggestions on how to tackle the dangers of overconnectivity: build new organisational structures instead of fixing existing ones.

So, is India overconnected? At one level, the government does not seem to have a clue about what is happening to the domestic economy and keeps releasing revised data. In turn, the Reserve Bank of India does not know how to make decisions with this fluctuating data. At another, in the remote tribal belts, paramilitary soldiers cut off from headquarters get slaughtered by Leftists rebels. It turns out they were unable to recharge their wireless sets because of power cuts. Talk of being underconnected.

Urban Indians are watching the US jobless rate keenly, as it could make or break the information technology industry. The poor in remote areas depend on government employment schemes. And what the government can spend on these depends partly on whether the West can buy Indian goods. So there is no escaping connectivity. As Davidow says, the Internet should make our existence better. But the Internet will do so only if we learn how to accommodate it.

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