The Intolerant, Misinformed Us

NASA makes it “official” that the earth would slip into 15 days of darkness. Using an app and changing your DP would automate some code which will count as a vote towards internet.org & against net-neutrality. The France Flag-gate. That Jasleen Kaur incident. The selective morality of Media & People. The Intolerance debate. Outraging against Outrages. 

The era we live in is often referred to as the Information age. Personally, it increasingly feels like a misnomer.

Yes, we are inundated with information from a zillion sources. The indexed web contains approximately 4.77 Billion pages, and then we have the Deep web too. Add to that a billion and a bit Social Media accounts. The rate at which information flows is fantastically ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with it. Information truly is wealth. But only if we know how to use it right.

For a race that is becoming increasingly educated, we seem to be losing the art of making informed choices. Any post, article, or image that looks or sounds remotely scandalous or "cool", goes into our Social Media pages, without a second thought. Diffusion of information has become more important than the legitimacy. And when the information is a bunch of unsubstantiated rumours, false claims, half-baked news, or just poorly worded to get the clicks, it makes the entire scenario all the more cacophonous. Even if the information is legitimate, the multitude of opinions formed by junta ends up making it exasperating. We just can’t seem to handle our Right to Speech. 

The Truth

How else do you explain Snapdeal's app being given a barrage of 1 star ratings by our "informed" junta, because its brand ambassador had an opinion that they don't buy? Yes, the method of outrage nowadays is just tweeting or uninstalling apps, but that's a story for a different blog.

The natural instinct of a human is to be a part of a community. And this extends to Social Media. The idea of virality is based on this psychological need of human beings. This flaw and our gullibility, in general, has made it easy to manipulate us. A hashtag, a picture, a post, or an article is all it takes for us to form opinions, and outrage if a different set of opinions arise. Our race has never been more egotistical.

The emotional need for a human being to be socially relevant, the ease of sharing information on Social Media, and the sheer abundance of information available on the internet (Legit or not) together has led us to the age of Misinformation. The only way past it seems to be shutting down Media and Social Media channels for a couple of months, and let the human race simmer down. Pretty confident we would still find a way to outrage though. A candle-light vigil every other day maybe?    

Evolution of Social Media - From Friend Requests to Business Enablers

Post Originally shared on LinkedIn

June 30th was the 6th Annual Social Media Day. Mashable, one of the leading Media companies in the world, initiated the idea of Social Media Day in 2010, as a way to recognize the Social revolution that has engulfed the globe over the past decade. And it has been a revolution of gargantuan proportions, witnessing exponential growth on a daily basis.

Read further on my post in LinkedIn

A Guide on How NOT to Use your Social Media!

Last week, a 20 year old young lad from Coimbatore committed suicide because he wasn't able to see Vijay's movie, Thalaiva, on the day of the release. Usually, the death of a person is reason to mourn. But this time, It was more of disgust. Three reasons -

• Why would someone kill themselves over someone who they have no emotional bond with?
• Why would someone kill themselves over something which will constitute just 3 hours of their life?
• Why would someone kill themselves at all?

What was the reason behind the young man taking such a drastic decision over a movie? Was he proving himself to be a “true fan”? Or was he just an idiot?

Nowadays, celebrity fandom is at an unimaginable high . The more one thinks of it, Social Media is the dominant reason for this. How? Let's try to think this out.

The humankind mimics, by nature. We humans subconsciously mimic when we are in a conversation with an individual, especially if they share similar interests. This is done to empathize with the speaker or the social circle or the community at large. What is to be noted is that an individual mimics through social interaction. In today's era, where social media is mightier than a pen or sword, the interaction is significantly more. People follow one another on twitter, actively argue on fan pages on Facebook and more often than not, push oneself over the edge.

10 years ago, when Social Media was in its embryonic stage and Internet was still in making its transition from from Dial-Up to Broadband, social interaction was restricted to one's actual social circle. No, not the Google + circles. People used to discuss on any topic within their circle, and the possibility of the discussion spreading across other similar groups, or going viral, was extremely remote.

Fast forward 10 years, Social Media plays the cruel parasite which has the power to not just spread any discussion to numerous social circles, but to twist, mutate and shape shift in ways the reciever wants to concieve. Chinese whisper on the web, if you may. Celebrities more often than not play the role of an Epiparasite. And we humans, play the hosts to the parasitic ambitions of Social Media. The idea is very similar to that of Meme Theory.

Everytime, a new major movie is up for release we see the twitterati explode with millions of tweets on how the movie is either going to be orgasmically good or it's going to be an insult to the intelligence of the masses. It is perfectly fine for someone to express their opinion on Social Media. But being the parasitic hosts we are, we feed these ideas onto other similar hosts (read retweets, shares, likes etc). Once the parasitic infection reaches a given level where it becomes “cool”, mimicking springs into action. People who may not even be remotely interested in being a part of the menagerie to begin with are sucked into it.

Just as this blog was being written, Sachin Tendulkar tweeted something about his support of the MARD initiative. Fair enough. The disheartening part of all this is the tweets by his so called fans. Tweets like “God is back to twitter”, “I joined twitter only to check Sachin's tweets”, “OMG, Sachin is here. My day has been made” etc were a dime a dozen. The last I checked, there was just 1 tweet supporting the Initiative as compared to 10 random, meaningless tweets? Needless to say, it is quite unnecessary.

The weeks leading upto Chennai Express's release,it was a pain looking at my TL and FB wall. It was either fans going gaga over SRK's brilliance or how it will be the worst movie in the history of the planet. Similar was the case before the release (Or Non-Release) of Thalaiva. There was this one section of Vijay “fans” bickering about how they will watch the movie FDFS and watch it n number of times. When the news of its non-release spread, there were innumerable tweets/posts about how people won't watch any other movie till its release.

The human mind is tweaked in a way that it accepts and processes information that is readily accessible, regardless of its credibility. With a freeflow of not particularly sensible information on Social Media, our minds are subconsciously filled with what we see (Oh, she had this dessert at xyz, it looks so yummy, I wanna eat it too) or what we read (Oh, he is reading the Homer’s Illiad, what a pretentious douche) to what we engage in (Let me spam this page with racial slurs and sit back and enjoy the backlash) . It has come to a point where we fail to distinguish between what to embrace and what to ignore.

Let us not forget that social media is a wonderful tool to stay in touch with people and establish contacts, participate in healthy discussions over controversial matters and receive new perspectives of people whom you might have never even met. All we are saying is that when you post a status asking the 800 friends on your list (quarter of which you don’t know personally) “what should I eat for dinner?”, what makes you think anyone cares. You might argue that people got back to you on that post. Some suggesting what you can eat, others might’ve listed the dishes on their three-course meal and an odd one or two would’ve politely asked you to sod off.

All we are saying here is that use the tools to make something constructive or at least amusing. If you take them and bash them against one another then all you make is noise and that my dear, adds chaos in the cosmos.

PS: Thanks to +Bhavya Sharma for helping me make some sense out of this blog.