Cyberians & Realitytians written by Abhijeet Pendharkar | Based on interview with Cyber Criminal Lawyer Adv. Mrs. Vaishali Bhagwat Conducted by Dhananjay Gokhale | For DVDs write to gita@dgonline.in
There are two kinds of people in this world. Cyberians & Realitytians.
Cyberians are the people who spend most of their lives in the cyber space. Realitytians are the people who spend most of their lives in the real world.
Cyberians are superior to Realitytians in many ways.
Cyberians have a capability to become anyone they like (by projecting a different persona on the internet). ‘Becoming someone else’ is considered as identity theft in Realitytians world. So they are allowed to do such things only in their dreams, dramas or movies.
Cyberians have super-natural powers that allow them to remain invisible in the cyber space. Invisibility gives them immense power to do anything they want. That’s why a Cyberian boy can write a bold (!) email to a Cyberian girl without fear of consequences.
Realitytians consider such behaviour as irresponsible &lacking accountability thereof. Actually they are just jealous of Cyberians’ freedom.
Cyberians are extremely proud of their technological advance. They feel great if their children are busy in laptops or mobiles. How their son is good at IT, how he has 3 Facebook accounts etc are major talking points in Cyberian Parties! Realitytians miss all this fun because they keep worrying about small things like whether their children would get spoilt due to the internet.
Cyberians are not bound by stupid things like laws or ethical code of conduct. Hence they are not too fussy about what is right & what is wrong. If they want to watch porn, then they simply go & watch. Majority of Realitytians secretly desire such freedom but they have rules ®ulations to adhere to. So they usually come up with twisted rules & regulations like ‘Storing porn is illegal but watching is not’. This is one of the reasons why mostly nothing happens in their courts of law.
Cyberians live in Cyber Space on sharing basis. They are so used to sharing that they consider anything & everything that is available in the cyber space as ‘shared by someone’. Naturally they don’t believe in formalities like copyrights, permissions etc. Realitytians find this very hard to digest because in their law books, ‘taking tangible, movable property without consent’ is defined as theft.
Cyberians are very social. They don’t mind connecting to any stranger on the internet. Most of them consider their lives as open books which anyone can read on social networking sites. Some extremely social Cyberians even go to the extent of sharing personal details such as bank account numbers & passwords. Realitytians are very conservative. They avoid talking to strangers let alone sharing personal data.
Cyber Space thrives on the word ‘free’. Cyberians are so used to this free world, they consider it very rude to purchase licensed copies of any software. Realitytians know by experience that nothing comes for free in the real world.
Cyberians also have cast system. The lowest level in the Cyber Society is popularly known as ‘Hackers’. The highest level likes to call themselves as ‘Ethical Hackers’. ‘Hackers’ are highly skilled professionals who take pride in exploiting vulnerabilities of people or systems. They have various sub-casts such as e-transaction hackers, database hackers, political hackers (specialising in defacement, sniffing or spying). ‘Hackers’ get elevated to ‘Ethical Hackers’ level when they start realizing that ‘exploiting vulnerabilities’ amounts to stealing. Then they no longer steal but help catch other ‘Hackers’. Rest of all Cyberians fall into a category which is somewhere in between these two.
In general, Cyberians keep complaining about Realitytians for having a legal system that does not work. Realitytians keep complaining about Cyberians for almost not having a legal system. Both of them keep complaining about each other for not having any ethical code of conduct in written form.
Guess who is not complaining?
