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No separate 'Act' !

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI: By now, everyone's blamed everyone in the MMS scandal. The kids, the parents, the media, the Western world, the police, the law, the IIT student, the times we live in--and the damned camera phone, for good measure. The newspapers and television have been making a meal of it like never-before-discovered strains of human behavior that have just been generated thanks to the chief villain, Technology.



To start with teenagers have been having sex since the beginning of time-you can "channelize their curiosity" all you like, they'll still do it, if they can. Guys will often kiss and tell-not just when they're young but when they're adults too. Most people will find it stimulating to see other people being sexual-it's a sheer physical response that human beings are designed with. There have always been thoughtless people who'll have fun or cash in on a situation without thinking the consequences or the impact on other people through. And there are sleazy low life types with delusions of grandeur who have more authority than brains. And guess what, the lot all live together on this planet-very often with unpleasant consequences. All of these behaviors have always existed, and you can safely bet they always will. With or without the help of technology.

What technology certainly has done is to do a quicker and more effective job of scaling it up to a larger number of people. It does that with "good" things, and it does that with "bad" things. Today you can ban camera phones, a few years down the line technology will be as pervasive as electricity and you won't be able ban selective parts of it. What then?






At the close of one year and the start of another, we're proud of ourselves as an IT superpower in the making. And we have an IT Act that's full of holes-holes through which the trigger-happy can shoot at will. Now that's something that can be changed. Just as technology's becoming an increasingly inseparable part of life, so should the IT Act. Rather than being separated and compartmentalized from the other laws, it should be threaded into them seamlessly. And when they've achieved that, they have to figure out how to continually keep pace with another thing that's inevitable-changes in technology.

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