Every day, every moment, someone or the other wishes for something, prays for something; or someone. The individual feels elated when his/her wish or prayer is heeded and, quite understandably, is surrounded by an air of disappointment if his desire is not fulfilled. But the point is, where all these wishes and prayers go? A widely accepted spiritual notion is that all these wishes diffuse into energy and become a part of the never ending cosmos. All of us know and agree upon the fact that energy can neither be created nor be destroyed. So all these wishes and prayers, in the form of energy, remain in the cosmos, waiting to be listened to, sometime or the other. The cosmos is a limitless reservoir in which these endless wishes wobble around.
There is always a set of rational thinkers who tend to disagree with such spiritual notions. Many of them might be reading this piece at the moment. Through this article, the author is not trying to convince those souls about the validity of this notion. Rather, the idea is to establish an analogy between the Cosmos and the World Wide Web.
The web, especially after the advent of Web 2.0, is a totally different playground. It is no longer a place where one checks in to get some information, data and records, send some emails, and then checks out. It’s a much different; a much better mesh today. It is now a place where you and i can contribute – through blogs, microblogs like twitter, social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut – and that too in a number of ways. A means of contribution is our wishes and prayers. Readers who are regular users of the above mentioned services would have come across such wishful ‘updates’ from other users many times. To quote an example, in the recent past, the author, in his pursuit of an invite to join Google Wave, has expressed his wishes on his twitter page many times as in I want #google #wave. Can anyone plz send me an invite. Also, there are personal as well as more general prayers posted by users. Some are like Pray for my brother. Today he tested positive for H1N1. God help him. while some others sound like Pray for ManU. Arsenal is posing a big threat to them tonight.
These wishes and prayers, emerging from the thoughts of users, transform to words and finally to chunks of electrical energy in the form of 0s and 1s before becoming a part of the Cloud, called the Internet. Then they float about in the web, uninterrupted, before someone interested stumbles upon them. Then it is up to the stumbler to either reply or simply ignore them.
When the author receives comments on his blog post published months back, his conviction in this analogy, that someday his wishes, floating about in the cosmos, will be heeded, is further strengthened. That’s what he believes is the power of the Cosmic Web.
