Know me, heard me or ever seen me?
Chances are you have, each and every moment,
Blog me, tweet me or post me on the wall,
You can hate me, but you can't ignore me,
You can love me, but you can't be obsessed with me,
I can be with You, but you have to let me Go sometime,
I die a silent death everyday - in the barrel of a madman's gun or the bomb of a soldier,
I am suffocated, stifled and suppressed at will - by those who think I'm a mere speck in a sandstorm, or a drop in the ocean,
But, have You ever wondered, that I'm the needle in the haystack which You have always been looking for?
Or the glimmer of light through a peephole?
I get crushed under the wheels of a bus, or am ripped apart by a mob,
Yet I don't give up, Yet I survive,
Because when I creep in through an oxygen mask, or the droplet of water on parched earth,
You are overjoyed to see me, You embrace me and cry out my name,
To which, I always reply: "Yes, I am Life!"
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
When Social Becomes Anti-Social
Speech is silver, silence is gold.
If you are reading this (including the cliche above), chances are that you are one of those who have lost faith in healthy social networking or are on the verge of doing so. But, all is not lost yet on the social media horizon. It's just that things are going a bit haywire in Web 2.0 (or 2.5 shall I say?). To evaluate social media in its true sense, one needs to trace its origin properly. I won't trace a detailed timeline here but what started with blogs and instant messenger clients is now down to 140 characters aka microblogging. In an era when having a mobile phone is passe, you are apparently 'nothing' if you don't 'tweet', as many social media analysts will have us believe. If you have a presence on Facebook or Orkut, maybe you are 'something'. But, is it 'everything.'
To look at some recent examples, what the Stephen Fry furore meant to the West was the Shashi Tharoor drama in India (albeit on different levels). If Mr Fry was 'boring', Mr Tharoor made it up in ways more than one by tweeting away to glory with his 'cattle class' and 'interlocutor' punchlines. On the face of it, the topics may have died a natural death in most discussion forums, but on a macro level, the debate has just started. What the Twitterati and Facebook superstars have shown us (maybe unwittingly) is that it's no longer politically incorrect to rant your heart out in public against even those whom you consider your closest. Alright, this may have been more of a Google Talk phenomenon but take a look at any average Indian's (and I don't want to sound demeaning here) Twitter timeline and you will easily figure out what I mean. From what you eat for breakfast to what you should wear for your cousin's wedding - you have to share it in your 140-characters of fame space, otherwise, you are just a 'nobody.' Interestingly, when Google tried to replicate this with Buzz, it had to take on the ire of users for exposing privacy and so on. True, just because the company is a pioneer in its own right does not mean it has the liberty to play around with people's personal lives.
But if that was the death knell for Buzz, wonder what is keeping Twitter alive. Apparently, the company has been monitoring some users who have been using it extensively as a public chatroom (the official version being that this is related to the phishing attack). But, monitoring or no monitoring, a silent evolution has already occurred. At the same time, this evolution is not without its share of bloodbath - something that the Twiteroor controversy kicked off. It is another matter for a minister to go on record in a social media platform, but it is not the when you see a personal conversation being read by hundreds of other people who will merrily concoct their own interpretations of it. This is where the 'retweet' feature comes in - to put it simply, you simply prefix an 'RT' before some post you like and then pass it on to your set of followers. But, is RTing a quote by Mahatma Gandhi the same as revealing someone's nickname? (Interestingly, the RTI Act has a near namesake in RT, with the first 2 letters). Well, big deal - you may say? But, think about it just once - considering you met someone on Twitter or someone you already know retweets what you would not what the whole world to know, what would you think about it? Well then, you may ask again - why do people flash custom status messages on Google Talk for their contacts to know? Right - they do, but there is an in-built privacy there where trust is also a big factor, which is the reason why Buzz got so much flak. But, when it comes to Twitter, such a concern goes for a toss...does it? It may not be ok for Stephen Fry to be boring, but it is ok for mere mortals like us to tell the whole world how much weight we are putting on everyday.
Besides, a big chunk of Twitter users are fond of putting inspirational quotes on their timeline. No harm with that - in fact - a nice quote has the power to always turn a dull moment into a bright one (the author of this piece himself, follows many users who put interesting quotes on their timelines). But, some users deliberately leave out the part of attributing the quote. If the words did not originally come from your mouth, is it wrong to say that somebody else said it? Some have raised a hue and cry over 'copyrighting tweets' and the general consensus seems to be that tweets cannot be copyrighted. But, a quote is a quote after all, even if it is shrink-wrapped into 140 characters.
If you have reached this paragraph, maybe you have changed your mind and are wondering if this issue is worth wasting so many words at all. Maybe it is not, but surely, if you are an observer of social media (and I have no qualms in admitting that I'm still learning this), then maybe you could think about it at least once...
If you are reading this (including the cliche above), chances are that you are one of those who have lost faith in healthy social networking or are on the verge of doing so. But, all is not lost yet on the social media horizon. It's just that things are going a bit haywire in Web 2.0 (or 2.5 shall I say?). To evaluate social media in its true sense, one needs to trace its origin properly. I won't trace a detailed timeline here but what started with blogs and instant messenger clients is now down to 140 characters aka microblogging. In an era when having a mobile phone is passe, you are apparently 'nothing' if you don't 'tweet', as many social media analysts will have us believe. If you have a presence on Facebook or Orkut, maybe you are 'something'. But, is it 'everything.'
To look at some recent examples, what the Stephen Fry furore meant to the West was the Shashi Tharoor drama in India (albeit on different levels). If Mr Fry was 'boring', Mr Tharoor made it up in ways more than one by tweeting away to glory with his 'cattle class' and 'interlocutor' punchlines. On the face of it, the topics may have died a natural death in most discussion forums, but on a macro level, the debate has just started. What the Twitterati and Facebook superstars have shown us (maybe unwittingly) is that it's no longer politically incorrect to rant your heart out in public against even those whom you consider your closest. Alright, this may have been more of a Google Talk phenomenon but take a look at any average Indian's (and I don't want to sound demeaning here) Twitter timeline and you will easily figure out what I mean. From what you eat for breakfast to what you should wear for your cousin's wedding - you have to share it in your 140-characters of fame space, otherwise, you are just a 'nobody.' Interestingly, when Google tried to replicate this with Buzz, it had to take on the ire of users for exposing privacy and so on. True, just because the company is a pioneer in its own right does not mean it has the liberty to play around with people's personal lives.
But if that was the death knell for Buzz, wonder what is keeping Twitter alive. Apparently, the company has been monitoring some users who have been using it extensively as a public chatroom (the official version being that this is related to the phishing attack). But, monitoring or no monitoring, a silent evolution has already occurred. At the same time, this evolution is not without its share of bloodbath - something that the Twiteroor controversy kicked off. It is another matter for a minister to go on record in a social media platform, but it is not the when you see a personal conversation being read by hundreds of other people who will merrily concoct their own interpretations of it. This is where the 'retweet' feature comes in - to put it simply, you simply prefix an 'RT' before some post you like and then pass it on to your set of followers. But, is RTing a quote by Mahatma Gandhi the same as revealing someone's nickname? (Interestingly, the RTI Act has a near namesake in RT, with the first 2 letters). Well, big deal - you may say? But, think about it just once - considering you met someone on Twitter or someone you already know retweets what you would not what the whole world to know, what would you think about it? Well then, you may ask again - why do people flash custom status messages on Google Talk for their contacts to know? Right - they do, but there is an in-built privacy there where trust is also a big factor, which is the reason why Buzz got so much flak. But, when it comes to Twitter, such a concern goes for a toss...does it? It may not be ok for Stephen Fry to be boring, but it is ok for mere mortals like us to tell the whole world how much weight we are putting on everyday.
Besides, a big chunk of Twitter users are fond of putting inspirational quotes on their timeline. No harm with that - in fact - a nice quote has the power to always turn a dull moment into a bright one (the author of this piece himself, follows many users who put interesting quotes on their timelines). But, some users deliberately leave out the part of attributing the quote. If the words did not originally come from your mouth, is it wrong to say that somebody else said it? Some have raised a hue and cry over 'copyrighting tweets' and the general consensus seems to be that tweets cannot be copyrighted. But, a quote is a quote after all, even if it is shrink-wrapped into 140 characters.
If you have reached this paragraph, maybe you have changed your mind and are wondering if this issue is worth wasting so many words at all. Maybe it is not, but surely, if you are an observer of social media (and I have no qualms in admitting that I'm still learning this), then maybe you could think about it at least once...
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