IRL and AFK? What does it tell?
Well, the former expands to 'In Real Life' and
latter to 'Away From Keyboard'. They still doesn't tell much about what they
mean, do they? Well, to make life easy for you, these abbreviations
are used by the 'geeks' to
differentiate the real life of a geek from the life that is spent on the
internet. That's how IRL or In Real Life came into being. But the super geeks
take offence from the term IRL. They say the life spent on the internet is
"real" as well. So better use Away From Keyboard (AFK) if you want to
mean what you meant! Fair enough. Isn't it?
I was watching the struggle of TPB to continue
being into existence after the Hollywood cracked down on it. Oh,
another abbreviation? That's 'The Pirate Bay', the famous file sharing
platform online.
There is a documentary called TPB AFK, where
you can see bits and pieces of the struggle put together. Among the many good
things about this documentary - which can be easily find on any peer-to-peer
file sharing site - is that it encourages you to share it online. Aptly so!
You also get to see the events of the lawsuits
filed on TPB guys and how they deal with it. Watching the live reaction of a
person who just found about his conviction in an ongoing case, is really
something that you don't get to see often.
It's the fight between millions of dollars at
stake verus the freedom of the internet. The ripples were also felt in India
not so long ago when complete file sharing sites were banned because of the
copyright infringement related to a movie; which was later lifted
when someone knocked sense into the Court ruling by suggesting to ban only the
URLs in question and not on the complete websites.
Don't think of it just as a matter of geeks
vs. governments. In the present time when freedom of expression is
just a term relative to Government policies, internet is the last frontier
where it is still being executed by the masses. It must be protected.
