The Social Net
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Thursday, 30 June 2011
Blogito Ergo Sum - July 2011
The possibilities of the word are aplenty.
It harks us back to the rolls of ancient papyrus, the sprawling parchments, on which worked painstaking quills of venerable steadfast scribblers - striving to crystallize their thoughts.
And in the modern day, it depicts the click of the mouse or the page down keystroke enabling us to read on beyond the screen.
Yet, in today’s world, is it satisfying to just scroll?
In Cognitive Surplus, his engaging and optimistic story of the connected world, Clay Shirky ends with an anecdote about the four year old daughter of his friend. In the middle of a movie she was watching on DVD with her father, she got off her couch, ran to the TV set and started rummaging among the wires behind the screen.
Contrary to her dad’s conclusion, she was not checking for the presence of actors back there. It was not a childish simulation of personal backstage. Instead, she was wading her way through the cables, hunting for a mouse.
She was not content with watching what was dished out; she wanted to get involved and alter the action.
The touching story throws glaring light on the virtual reality of the current world. Culture has changed. From consumers content with lapping up the offerings of elitist producers, the world is moving towards universal contribution and involvement. Television and newspapers, erstwhile monopolies of a consumerist community, are fast giving way to a Web 2.0 powered society. Man, the social animal, is clicking his way back to a community that transcends the geographical distances. A community which they don’t just join, but play a part in scripting.
We see the results of the change everywhere – in the modern wonders of decentralised systems, from Wikipedia to the YouTube, from Citizen Bloggers to Facebook Revolutions.
True, Cogito Ergo Sum has made way for Blogito Ergo Sum.
Predictably, as in the case of any global trend, technological upheaval and changing thought process, this socially networked world has been quickly given the status of a panacea, a silver
bullet, a philosopher’s stone that will turn all that is evil into gold, with a brief intervention of silicon.
Our previous issues have hinted at how the current world of technological advancements helps us authors embark on the fibre optic cables to circumnavigate the ivory towers of traditional publishers.
In this issue we take a step back and look at some of the pros and cons of the socially networked world. Is it really a solution to all the problems of the world? Or are there booby-traps embedded in the enmeshed social connections?
And in the spirit of the modern collaborative cyber-sphere of social capital, we have tried to capture the thoughts and opinions of readers in our analysis – the results of which are shared in a separate article.
Enjoy scrolling.
Arunabha Sengupta is the co-editor of Scroll and the author of three novels, the latest being The Best Seller
Mousetrap - Beyond Television
Arunabha Sengupta
A child hunting for a mouse behind the television is a picture poignantly painted in Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, and recounted in our editorial as a symbolic snapshot of the modern world.
While the global phenomenon of a collaborative news sharing, social debates and communication is self evident through numerous websites, blogospheres, social networks and knowledge tools, some of the factors involved in the current change may seem counter-intuitive.
A lot of the social capital that is leveraged through websites such as Wikipedia, You Tube and also FaceBook are results of purely voluntary investment of personal time and effort. In rare, numerically insignificant cases, are they balanced by financial benefit. Most of the contribution is generated beyond working hours by people otherwise fully employed.
The obvious question is why do they take all this trouble? Why click away to exhaustion neither for gold nor glory? How does one manage the time to upload knowledge nuggets on Wikipedia or videos on YouTube or commentary on journalistic blogs after a full day and a half of energy sapping work at his primary trade?
For all of us who grew up in the second half of the twentieth century - with its presupposed television box in the corner, newspaper on the porch and the stereotypical economic thought of material benefit in the mind, this is indeed a paradigm shift difficult to comprehend.
Modern economics is heavily pre-biased about how every man works for his own self interest – the last couple of words directly translated into financial gain. Much of the economic turmoil of recent times may have been the result of this myopic understanding of human motivation, but that is the subject matter of a different discussion. When Adam Smith first laid down his theory, self interest was not limited to monetary profits but encroached and encompassed psychological aspects as well. It consisted of whatever made the individual feel enriched. Whatever led to his feeling of wellbeing.
Much of the last century was spent by man creating an island around himself that was primarily centred around his work, linked only to a few friends and colleagues, while weakly joined to the bigger world through the mass media of print and television. The epochal ‘accident’ of the dominance of print and telecommunication technology ensured this consumerist behaviour, aided and abetted by the ivory towers that were built around the upper echelons of these industries.
However, by nature man is known to be a social animal – and hence contributing to his parent group is one of his basic characteristics. With this new technological marvel of the internet, followed by the plethora of social networking applications cropping up, he has rediscovered a route to reconnect. The desire to form groups of likeminded individuals - to communicate with and exchange ideas, thoughts and labours of love actively - is fast winning through. His social self is coming to the fore yet again, while the sense of well being that comes from belonging with other resonating souls, mutually making lives meaningful are more than compensating for the economic benefits that such an arrangement lacks.
As far as time investment is concerned, one needs only to look at the hours spent by the previous generations in watching reality shows, sitcoms and professional wrestling. While television-conditioned addicts seldom enquire about the colossal man-years spent in following the lives of Big Brother participants, this perspective can shine a illuminating light in the search for lost time, today redistributed in the more involved brand of entertainment called social engineering.
Robert McHenry, former editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, has gone on record likening Wikipedia to a public rest room. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft has denounced the shared production of open source software by invoking comparisons with something he feels is a swear word – communism. Andrew Kern, author of The Cult of the Amateur, drew parallels between bloggers and monkeys.
Although loudly echoing vested interests, these concerns ask a common and important question. Can shared, unmanaged work, while fine for picnics, compete with serious labour carried out for money, directed by managers and conducted by organisations?
Let us look at one example.
Recently, a national newspaper of India published an article about the government banning deodorant commercials. Slightly off beat, it might have passed as a regular news item if vigilant netizens had not detected that it was a copy and paste job from a site named – quite indicatively – FakeNews.com. By virtue of its name and mission statement, FakeNews is a sparkling media-parody site, that publishes false bulletins to generate some hard hitting and some purely side splitting satires. This prestigious Indian daily had ripped off one such article. And due to the collaborative effect of the modern cyber-world, the story was soon picked up and published in a major UK based world news site, the classical media men still blissfully unaware of the faux pas.
The question that rises from this is whether this is a recent phenomenon, or lousy journalism of this sort has existed throughout history and is being unearthed today because of the heavily networked world?
Moving to a much weightier issue, the power of social media was realised recently when citizen journalists posted and tweeted reports, photos and videos of the disaster in Japan – thus producing text and footage which would never have made past the higher echelons of editorial desk.
In such contexts, individual contribution to world news and information is not only a productive pastime adding to a sense of social well being, but also a way of regulating half truths to make the world whole, to clean up the monopolistic complacence that has obviously crept into decadent establishments.
With the social radius having become infinite thanks to the web based tools and applications, which are simple enough for even the non-technical public force to contribute, the scope of social organisation, engineering and product is immense. Whatever in previous generations seemed limited because of groups of limited number of people working for a cause with personal constraints, has now been multiplied by infinity that comes with global connectedness. Unfinished work by a Chinese blogger can now be completed by someone from Alaska. All this makes us believe that such clean ups and an absolute change of the social dynamics is very much on the cards, in fact, being etched on them at this moment.
And this makes optimistic political soothsayers grasp at the power of social connections as a panacea.
However, while so promising in terms of collaborative knowledge compilation, is social engineering also equally adaptive to the world of revolutions and overthrow of dictators as many would lead us to believe?
Several articles in this issue deal with this rather difficult question.
Arunabha Sengupta is the co-editor of Scroll and the author of three novels, the latest being The Best Seller
Arunabha Sengupta is the co-editor of Scroll and the author of three novels, the latest being The Best Seller
Is the Click Mightier than the Blast?
By
Shruti Rattan
Shruti Rattan
There is a proverbial pitfall well known to any statistician of merit. So perilous and rampantly ignored is this booby trap, that Wikipedia has an article specifically tited ‘Correlation does not imply causation.’
However, the current dynamics of the world – with its accelerating technological leaps, connected psyches and the media blurred boundaries between publicists and academia – have more often than not led trend watchers to ignore the tenet.
Revolutions are cropping up all over the world – well, at least in the Northern parts of Africa, and generalisation is but a sleight of words.
At the same time, in the cyber-conscious connected word, social media is burgeoning. Already archaic today is being heaved by the collar into the just-in-time juggernaut of tomorrow.
It is easy to conclude that the two are interlinked. It is optimistically heartening to think that the click is mightier than the blast and will end up promoting democracy and Starbucks the world over.
And at the same time, it is dangerous to make such pronouncements.
In this mad rush of looking ahead towards the future, playing the self proclaimed visionary, resisting the temptation to glance back even for an instant - afraid of missing out on the birth of a new path-connecting innovation, it is indeed easy to forget something similar that took place as far back as 1848. One hundred and sixty odd years ago, rising food prices and high unemployment figures in Europe had resulted in the original revolutionary spring of nations across France, Germany, Denmark, Habsburg, Switzerland, Poland, Wallachia, Belgium and even on the other side of the Atlantic in New Grenada and Brazil. The populace across continental Europe and Latin America were not linked by any common society, let alone Social Media. Even Radio was not to be invented for a good many decades. Yet, there are many who believe The Arab Spring to be a series of revolutions made possible by the Socially Networked World. Historical agnosticism keeps many ignorant regarding the origins of the moniker.
The claims of political clairvoyance and visionary foresight in this regard can be ignored as self propaganda and trumpet blowing. However what makes it dangerous is the way such proclamations can zip and zoom across the networked world and place actual real life people in mortal danger.
With the Obama administration caught up in throes of digital delight, the enmeshed and entangled world of the internet was deemed panacea without rational analysis. The tweets coming in from Iranian dissidents were interpreted as the ushering in of a new era. Consequently an email was sent from the Oval office or one of the adjacent rooms to the Twitter administrators to defer their maintenance schedule, to enable the digital dissidents to continue tweeting.
A lot of it probably has to do with the perception of the Hollywood prototype of the authoritarian dictator – a man caught in the Middle Ages, trying hard to protect his regime from the changing winds by hiding behind burkhas and Soviet era tanks. The men responsible for sending out that email, and people like Jared Cohen going out all cylinders hyping FaceBook as the organic way to democracy, did not pause to think of the criminal damage these armchair actions could result in.
The very act of Western leaders and policymakers coming out in praise of the Social Networking tools alerted the techno-savvy dictatorial leaderships. That the Norwegian Nobel Committee did not object to the Internet being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Italian Wired Magazine did not help things either. Add to that the Google publicists beating their genetic algorithm enhanced drums about association with the NSA, and the Twitter and FaceBook executives hobnobbing with the Homeland Security honchos. This has set in motion a series of actions and counter strategies by the governments of China, Russia, the fragmented Soviet nations and Iran – regimes where the United States still thinks Twitter and FaceBook will be playing the role of the modern day Samizdat.
In Iran, the 2009 revolutions tripped on counter digital manoeuvres. As US based pundits went on talk shows about the current social media fad, Iranian bloggers were traced by following their messy internet footprints, many ending up in real life prisons. Counter measures, censorship and reverse propaganda using the same social network tools were launched, resulting in a rebellion that failed to load. In the debris of disappointment remained the question - how much of the much hyped tweeted dissent was actually generated in Iran. Statistics show around 0.027 percent of the Iranian population had Twitter accounts at the time of the 2009 elections. A lot of the freedom furore was the contribution of users like oxfordgirl, who, as the name indicates, was an Iranian journalist resident within the safe walls of the Oxford University. It is still unclear how many of the tweeters who registered their location as Tehran were actually tweeting from there rather than home and dry in the United States of America.While the spread and globalisation of dissent is not discouraged, this article is mainly concerned about the counter electronic measures taken by the dictatorial regimes and how the safety, security, freedom and sometimes lives of activists have been compromised by the rather callous declarations by the Western policymakers and spokespersons.
Digital Footprints: Anyone who has used a web application like Amazon or TripAdvisor will be aware of the phenomenon of personal customisation. The sites seem to know the preferences, likes and dislikes of the visitor. Not only does the online provider remember the preferred items one shopped or showed interest in, they demonstrate an uncanny knack of predicting what the user will be interested in based on his past visits. Similarly, Facebook has the eerie tendency of suggesting who are likely to be our friends from their huge database of personal information.
With web analytics and surf based forecasting becoming emerging business tools, these technologies are in the upswing of development. Hal Varian - Google’s chief economist, Johan Bollen of Indiana University and others have already done path-breaking research in this area.
And while the preliminary algorithms had been focused on finding habits and connections on the web for targeted sales predictions, this has already been picked up by governments to sniff out dissenters and their associates.
The footprints left on the cyberspace by bloggers and networked activists have been used to apprehend, censor and sometimes punish not only the dedicated dissidents but also members on their friend lists. There have been instances of particular blogs and FB groups disappearing from the server all of a sudden. Real life security police have paid visits to the homes of activists, after locating them through tower and server tracking. Neutral individuals with activist friends on their electronic address books have been picked up for questioning.
Social Network Ugly Fact Sheet 1
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As a former KGB agent recently joked, nowadays all the secret police has to do is to browse through the Friend list of the activist.
While that may be trivialising the complicated cloak and dagger world, some disturbing truths lie underneath the surface of levity.
The activists of the pre-internet era swore by some ground rules which kept them from compromising their peers. The most important of all was never to carry address books. Any list which pointed to the members of a rebelling faction could be curtains for the entire movement. In contrast, by definition, the connecting power of the Social Web comes with the electronic record of these very interactions.
Social Network - The Ugly Fact Sheet 2
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Digital Watchdogs: Throughout the history of the 20th century, we have had examples of Western arms dealers supplying expensive arsenal to the totalitarian regimes. These arms deals, used by the dictators to curb the local dissent and rebellions, were purely profitable business for the West. In the sophisticated world of web based politics, a similar story is being played out. Many Western firms, sniffing returns of investment- caring as much for freedom and democracy as corporations habitually do - have taken up supplying software to regimes to track cyber activities of dissenters.
The governments have also adapted themselves to the modern trends of the connected world. To maintain scalable operations of censorship and tracking dissidents, they have taken the help of two popular strategies of current corporations. Outsourcing and Crowdsourcing.
The companies offering the services of Web 2.0 where activists and dissident bloggers operate are, after all, service providers working in the real world. Powerful governments can bully them to censor and remove content that is offensive. Experiments carried out recently show such trends of censorship in China and Russia, where suppression is haphazard, effective and does not tax the resources of the governments.
Further, there is also the growing trend of alliances of tech savvy individuals loyal to government causes or ideology.
Being a playing field of large numbers, the internet does attract all kinds. These enlightened pro-government surfers can and do play whistleblowers.
The fundamental problem with online activism is that it does away with a lot of axiomatic principles required for a successful revolution. For a revolution demanding sacrifice and commitment, a central command is necessary while the circle of activists need to be strongly connected and private. By definition, internet activism is a collection of weak links, decentralised governance and glaringly public.
While decentralised collective intelligence can work wonders for Wikipedia, it is the worst kind of association to foment rebellion. And a weak link – in the form of an armchair clicking dissenter who likes all FB posts of his activist friends, a pro government whistle blower or a compromised company providing web based services – can actually destroy and endanger the entire organisation.
Counter Techniques: Countries like China and Russia have also started the logical and popular concept of domestic social networks. Services like RuNet are far more popular in Russia than FaceBook. In China, of the 300 million web users only 14000 are on FaceBook. This gives the government further control over the online activists by controlling the domestic companies. Dmitri Medvedev can now learn everything he wants from reports sent by the Russian hosting companies.
Another technique used by governments to silence online dissidents is DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service. All Websites have limits of occupancy, and dissident bloggers using censorship circumventing sites generally end up on servers that can handle much less numbers than a CNN.com or an Amazon. A DDoS attack, triggered by computers infected by malware or viruses, sends thousands of programs masquerading as users to the site, thus bringing the service down and making it unavailable. Nowadays, such applications for hostile takeover of sites are sold on eBay for a few hundred dollars.
Counter Intuitive Promotion: While censorship and silencing is one part of the game, wise authoritarian governments also promote the use of Internet – even the Western elixirs of democracy FaceBook and YouTube – for other completely different reasons.
One predominant driving factor is that, a centralised movement directed towards propaganda is still more powerful than scattered fragments of disconnected connections of denial. The battalion of government funded Chinese bloggers infiltrating the blogosphere and manipulating public opinion is already well known. Hugo Chavez, not exactly known for his brevity, now sports a Twitter account which can be very appropriately viewed as his alter ego.
The other, slightly subtler, motivation stems from the social susceptibility to cheap entertainment. The more the younger generation is caught up with the videos of cute cats, the unchecked and immense opportunities of hooking up with virtual heavenly bodies and can satisfy their social conscience with a few likes on politically charged issues posted on Facebook, the government can sit back and watch the show without too many serious fires to douse. With the young Russians waking up to Lady Gaga chimes, and spending hours watching ripped versions of Avatar, the government is spared the expenses and headaches to come up with boring state controlled entertainment programmes.
After all, contrary to what the West would like to believe, citizens in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes continue to be normal populace, not a regiment of Arthur Koestler characters.
In fact, the Russian government is so clearly aware of these phenomena that they have linked the world of superficial entertainment with propaganda. This is conspicuous in the rise of Konstantin Rykov, the young godfather of Russian internet. While his claim to fame started on becoming Russia’s first pornographer, his immense popularity made him diversify into pro government propaganda as well, including entertaining games with strong conservative pro Russian undercurrents.
The Chinese have followed suit as well, with the recruitment of a number of bright youths in the government to dominate the internet, popularising games which promote national traditions and posting video clips of actors posing as the random passersby who mouths positive sentiments about the government.
Gradually, these countries are waking up to another major and sophisticated truth, something that the United States of America discovered some decades back. It is easier to control dissent by allowing mild tongue in cheek criticism rather than bull-headedly banning every anti-government voice. The sitcom viewers watch with a smile while David Schwimmer of Friends presents his on screen son with a ten inch GI Joe, introducing the toy figure as the protector of American Oil Interests abroad. Thus amused and satisfied social consciousness keeps many of the audience from joining street rallies extolling the same cause. Chinese and Russian governments are now opening up many of the policies or even investigations to bloggers and web-activists, creating a pseudo open culture that anesthetises much of the internal agony that leads to rebellion.
Social Network - The Ugly Fact Sheet 3
a. Tomaar philosophy group of Saudi Arabia b. Irrawady, Mizzima and Democratic Voice of Burma – Burma’s exiled media c. Belarusian oppositional site Charter 97 d. Russian Independent Newspaper Novaya Gazeta e. Kazakh oppositional newspaper – Respublika f. Cyxymu – popular Georgian bloggers
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Networked Fanaticism: Looking at the situation with retrospection, we come across another fact staring at us immediately under the contemporary scales on global eyes. Democracy by definition implies multiple thought and independence of opinions. In the decentralised social media, one can expect rich and diverse ideas, collaborative thought – but it is difficult to expect the concentrated leadership indispensable to any planned revolution. As will be seen in other articles, it is also a breeding ground for slacktivism.
In fact, it is far more likely that groups of like thinking fundamentalists will be united by common causes in the Social Networking Circles. Indeed, tweets, status updates and text messages to spread hatred and incite severe forms of racial and ethnic indiscrimination have been around for a while – something conveniently ignored by the Western policymakers who eulogise Web 2.0 as the technology driven messiah .
Wherever we see successful revolutions using social media, the common factor is undeniable. It is a long standing and stable movement with able leadership, which use Twitter, texting and FaceBook to organise the activism at low cost, thus neutralising the infrastructural advantage of the governmental authority. However, in the light of all that is discussed above, whether such an approach is recommended in the face of a thoughtful and technologically competent regime is subject to a lot of questions.
Till then we must desist the wishful thinking that a menu utility File --> Change --> History is enough for us to rewrite the times from the safe refuge of our couches and laptops.
*
Shruti Rattan is a fictitious character who appears in Arunabha Sengupta’s latest novel The Best Seller.
An Amsterdam based researcher on political science, she is also a talented author and compulsive punster.
Social Net - Working Or Not?
by CrazyLazy
Social Networking is changing the entire world, at least at the present moment.
It is really amazing to witness how easy it has become to touch people digitally - either by commenting on status messages or just by putting a thumbs up on their photos, videos or blogs. It’s simple, it’s quick and it’s free and hence addictive. It’s hip for teenagers in search of quick adult identity. It’s a wonderful buddy for a traveler who wants to reconnect to familiar circles transcending challenges of time zones.
It runs on the mobile phone allowing anybody to just press a button and share a personal moment. It also emulates a group discussion forum where all comments are made public to a group of friends and their friends and even further to friends’ friends. So an intelligent quip can draw a reaction in the form of a ‘like’ or a comment and it can cascade even further into a longish thread if the group-force desires to take it that far.
The language is free from any bar and can be interspersed with emoticons capturing any specific moods. If we like comparing this with that of emails and SMS then this is perhaps positioned in between. While email has to follow grammar and spelling and text messaging does not have to abide by any such rules but just exist as phonetically functional and economically zip-locked, the social networking language can range from copy-pasted anything to original writings.
So the disposition is pretty much open for a friendly interaction. Most popular amongst the social networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and Twitter which have successfully diverted and transformed most of the email traffic from Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail to themselves. However the best part of sites like Facebook is that friends can be searched by names and ‘friend requests’ can be sent to strangers whose email addresses are not known. This is phenomenally exciting for teenagers, the twilight aged and even those in between who want to to search for friends and who are avidly waiting to exchange gratifications, thereby exponentially increasing their friend lists.
But some statistics are really astonishing. Would we believe that more than 767,063 people like the profile of Paris Hilton for any other reason than just drooling at her photos? Likewise, it’s also true that some of the friend requests come to us with similar curiosities written all over.
Virtually Yours …
This is changing the social behavior of people living in cities, who having gone through a phase of independent workaholic loneliness and boredom are now finding the appearance of red notifications on their Facebook dashboard caring and comforting. With the economy slowing down, the salaries getting cut, the increments becoming infinitesimally small and the superiors complaining far more than ever before, it is generally quite depressing to wade through each and every work week before finally reaching the shores of our planned weekend getaways. Such weekend consumption sprees are stimulating since those are supposed to be the best ways of getting entertained and also quickly prompting us to putting check-marks on our weekend planners. These check- marks are of immense value when we are in a circle of friends or colleagues in real life or in the surreal circle of Facebook friends.
A lot goes into our prior planning and online research in discovering those links which offer ‘more for less’, thus paying us back in pure currency- denominated satisfaction. But the check- marks do not end those stories. That job gets accomplished only after those getaway photos are shared on social networking sites amongst friends and their gratifying comments and likes are received against most of them. It is similar to a salesman sending a survey questionnaire to a buyer for rating a product or a service just sold and then waiting in expectation for a superlative feedback. And if that happens, then our joys shoot through the roofs, bringing in reassuring smiles and reaffirming our justifications of splurging on those very special getaways.
Also for others these become great references to start with their own weekend planning.
As opposed to persons with families, those are single and have been earlier glued to dating sites, have now gradually taken to one of these social networking sites in search of authentic friendship which their old acquaintances or batch mates can perhaps provide, or just take to it for the sake of variety. Surprisingly for us this form of socializing has become a source of greater entertainment than even watching online flicks. We do not have to dress up for the real parties with friends nor plan for logistics. We just need to deck up our moods to the virtual party beats and glide into a wonderful few moments of comfort and bliss.
Also the face- time between friends and families are decreasing. Same holds true for our verbal communication and story telling skills. Every communication now seems to be filtered and condensed like carefully- worded advertisement punch-lines with goal-driven sales pitches. There was a brief period earlier when urban workforce spending long hours at offices regularly chose colleagues as relationship partners only to justify spending significant time of their relationships on the common convenient street, but of late those are slowly giving way to far greater choices panning a far larger virtual world.
Those who are in their teens today are hardly expected to marry or live with their colleagues. They will perhaps transcend all boundaries of states, nations, languages, religions, institutions and reach out with their hearts to whosoever will give full attention to their virtual identity. On the other hand a more mature group will try to seek their roots and their ties with their past, their families, their religions, their languages, their nations, their states and even their ethnicities. Both these pursuits will have immense passion, traction and excitement while embracing the unknowns. No wonder the erstwhile patrons of newspapers, weeklies and television are shifting their loyalties! Also much pronounced will be our gradually becoming fearlessly articulate in the virtual world and obnoxiously muted in the real one and as communications become asynchronous, more of our real slow analytical thoughts and even deeper introspections reflecting on what and how we eventually articulate. A day may not be far away when a teenager, who may feel shy in confronting a parent, will explain with effortless ease her action in status messages on Facebook, because a virtual medium does not have the ego, ethos, prejudices and hierarchies like real- life individuals.
Must be the next big thing …
The business, currently in need of some steroid shots, has pinned all its hopes on social networking to be the vehicle which will drive industrial revenues in the next few years. It promises to simulate the entire world market on the social networking sites, put gaming console like dashboards on top for the industry captains to monitor and play with, to accelerate the growth of revenues for all industries and finally deliver a panacea for the world which has been thoroughly shaken by the global financial crisis. Does it sound like wishful thinking? Maybe or maybe not. But the truth is that the businesses definitely want it to succeed and deliver on each of the promises. The businesses themselves are prepared to change the way they work currently. They now predict the demand by analyzing their consumer buying behaviors using Customer Relationship Management systems. Well, these systems can only track buying patterns of existing customers but cannot capture the details for potential future ones. And the latter is far greater in numbers than the former. With social networking, their ambitious plan is to integrate current customers, share profiles in social networking groups, through the friends and their friends’ friends and hence capture data of the future customers. Further they may like to integrate their customer loyalty programs with incentives and reward points for referrals and direct orders from friends who are in their current friend- list. Also social networking sites can be a very reliable places for capturing feedback from friends on products and services sold to them which otherwise are done by sending survey questionnaires. This new approach can provide a much more direct way for business to communicate with their current and as well as prospective customers and can result in greater customer-satisfaction and probably higher revenues. Similarly, procurement and recruitment functions can also become more optimized and cheaper as the social networking market grows bigger. After-sales support can have faster responses and can cost less at the same time if issues are discussed and resolved amongst the customers who are 'friends'.
The businesses are also sensitive of the changing social preferences. They are aware that the consumers, especially the youths, are shifting their attention away from print and electronic media to more online means and even more to mobile telephony. So their new campaigns have targeted these new-age media. In fact, currently more than 50% social- networking users access it from their mobile phones.
Also the technological advancements, open economies, liberal trade regulations and finally the change in social behaviors of the people have encouraged them to embark upon a humongous plan. They are also aware of the convergence of service providers - for example, internet, wired and wireless telephone, broadband and television which will help the entire initiative.
Economy and politics are inter-connected and hence it may be possible that by implementing social networking, globally large corporations will try to fulfill some of their political agendas as well. Since this is a powerful propaganda-machine, it can be used by government departments, agencies, institutions, and social activists to raise popular support on serious issues as has been in the upheavals in the North African countries and the Middle- East. Though the social- networking throughput is intended for loading sponsor pages with streaming videos and for discussion forums on various merchandise (with the intention introducing direct marketing through friend-chisees and peer-to-peer product support by shopping-friendly mates), the idle bandwidth will still have enough for some free propaganda.
Also post- 9/11, governments have been spending heavily on homeland security, on profiling people, on monitoring mobile calls and on tracking various financial transactions. Social- networking sites may also fall in line with that agenda. In future, analytics software can start monitoring people like laboratory animals! Privacy, which still remains a dodgy area, can be superficially protective from casual onlookers – however, if somebody needs to really prey into private data, that might not be prevented at all. So users must exercise some restraint in the beginning and also bear in mind the consequences of misuse. Though privacy and security may not be the same, here we somehow have security preying into privacy. From security perspective a naked man threatens none though from privacy perspective it can still send signals to other perverts.
Before we discuss more on this, let us move to another topic. Here we study the different roles and interactions of entities which comprise the private business enterprise circus and how they all are delicately connected by strings. This will also set the context and throw some ideas about how people will be impacted if this grand plan is implemented like their dream.
All the people, who we discussed about earlier as friends in social networking, play their role as real-life consumers with varying needs and buying capacities. Let us try to categorize these friends into types.
First are those who in addition, play very important roles as the workforce for business in its various functions like marketing, procurement, production and support services. Let us call them Type I.
Next are kids, teens and young adults who are still students and some of them may have part- time jobs (belong to the age group between 0 - 21 years). Let us call them Type II.
Following in the wakeare the large business owners (Type III) and home makers (Type IV).
Let the small business owners be also classified as Type I.
Assume the self- employed like doctors, lawyers, authors, artists, actors be either Type I or Type III depending on whether they have mediocre earnings or really astronomical ones as celebrities in their respective professions.
There could still be another group of retired individuals who have steady earnings from their past investments in debt instruments or stocks and also from gifts / remittances from children or kin. Let us call them Type V. The following illustrations refer to a few numbers more for helping us to compare qualitatively the income and spending ratios for various types at a rough order of magnitude rather than actually letting us worry about the accuracy of those, which is more of a quantitative exercise and bear no relevance to this discussion.
One, which Type consumes how much? Currently more than 50% of the global consumption for goods and services is by Type II. If we look at the Type IV consumers, mostly women, they consume another 20%. For Type V (considering an aging world population) even a conservative estimate will put that as 10%.
Two, which Type borrows money and pays maximum interest? Globally speaking almost all of Type II who are above 16 years are perhaps in debt. Debt to income ratio or DTI is currently between 0.6 (for Type I) and 0.8 (for Type II, Type V and also for some Type I who are temporarily out of jobs) and in future these ratios are slated to head further north.
Three, which Types are the maximum beneficiaries of business profit? 50% of the world’s profit from private enterprises are earned by 5% people mainly Type III (i.e. large entrepreneurs, private equity owners, investment bankers and CXOs of multinational corporations). Type III comprise mostly of aged bums who seldom support their families (other Type II and Type IV) but like to roam as free discretionary birds looking for ambitious nymphs.
Four, what’re the most pathetic of Types? They are Type I. They are themselves moderate consumers (for example they spend on houses, cars, vacations and debt servicing) but also essentially provide for all their children’s conspicuous needs, education, hi-tech and high octane life styles and their credit card debts (Type II). They may also support Type IV (both if divorced or not) and sometimes Type V (though in western societies those are usually loners). Also, they earn much less compared to the high profits which the Type III earn for themselves (25% - 40% or sometimes quite absurdly high).
A much publicized answer in defense for such high profits is that Type III have the ability to absorb high risks (can absorb losses in revenue and pay penalties in the event of T&C breaches or pay damages when a lawsuit is lost) while for Type I that risk-taking ability is almost nil. The latter, it is argued, are unable to sustain even the slightest irregularities in their incomes and will perhaps break downon hearing of possible pay cuts. But counter arguments could also be that these employees had earned their degrees and diplomas with their own money or by borrowing it while taking the entire risks on themselves. Besides, they constantly bear the risks of losing their jobs at any moment when their performances really dip or their employer desires to lay them off by contriving a verdict from the annual evaluation process. Finally, after 2008, Type I have actually taken pay cuts when the actual quarterly revenues did not meet the ambitious growth targets which somehow are always set at 10% or its multiples but never at anything like 3.79% or 9.07%. So why should Type I not be considered as risk takers even with their current statuses? Also in the event of losses, Type III not only take recourse to government tax shields and concessions (or bail out packages) but also use contingencies that are already built into their products and services costs as immediate shock absorbers. Besides, their bonuses (which are guaranteed sums per signed contracts) never get slashed even when the revenue targets are not met or the company reports a loss. Their money is always stowed away in offshore funds which are managed by the best fund-managers, thereby hardly allowing that corpus-value to erode. In fact Type III’s corpus only grows and that too at a very rapid rate. They never get poorer whereas Type I does get fleeced in several permutations and combinations.
Let us now look at another possibility of crediting Type III more than Type I with their actual performances on their respective job roles so that we can justify such skewed sharing of payouts. Type I engaged in manufacturing and construction industries are mostly of entry-level employees as well as a few experienced middle-level employees with even less, say 1%, senior level employees. Type I in services industries are also mostly from entry- level with a few supervisors and 1-2 managers. They have set targets and they handle the entire sales and delivery of goods and also provide support services to customers. CXOs are there as the budget approvers and the signatories of all contracts. They attend lunch and dinner meetings with high- profile customers and deliver key- note addresses at town- hall meetings once every quarter. They spend paid vacation with families or partners or significant others. They do not have any downside risks other than being asked to walk out of the job carrying a hefty severance package. All creditors are liabilities to the enterprise but not a single one of them are tied to CXO’s personal assets. For those who are owners amongst Type III, can choose to file under bankruptcy law after transferring all personal assets to other family members or to fictitious accounts. Comparisons of their risk- taking abilities and that of their performances have both failed to clearly justify the reason for such a disproportionate distribution of their incomes. So we can infer that payouts are decided by pure rolling of the dice or luck and most other arguments are fluff.
Now let us examine the quandary of Type I. As employees, they are given targets to stoke the consumerist spirits in potential buyers which also include their own children, spouse and dependants. On the other hand, as consumers, when Type I purchase those products on their credit cards they add up to their liabilities. And quite amusingly, the incentives and bonuses are designed with such clinical delight that Type I can earn those additional perks only to pay for their additional debts on their credit cards or can relinquish those incentives only to see that the debt burdens too got equally reduced. However the only advantages of taking those incentives are seeing the happy faces of their spouses and children with more regularity. That experience is indeed priceless.
What will happen to people by Types if social networking is implemented as the business desires? Type II and Type IV will step on their consumption accelerators with their sights only on the promised future while dreaming that one day Type II will become self employed Type III and Type IV will become the entrepreneur Type I or even the entrepreneur Type III. The harsh realities of the debt traps will perhaps evade their dreamy eyes. If at all there will be somebody to bother about that debt then it could be Type I. But nobody else will care about Type I, since they are such pathetically cautious consumers! And even Type I themselves will de-skin that status when they step into the shoes of enterprise managers! They have to set their eyes on their targets and that’s what they must achieve or else they will be tagged as worse performers, gagged out of their jobs. Social networking will bring in far greater competition amongst Type I workforce for the same jobs. Other small suppliers who are Type I may also join the same race by quoting lower prices. Type I entrepreneurs may even switch roles temporarily with a Type I workers. Again, every year, some Type II will graduate as Type I workforce and compete with the current lot at a much cheaper level. Eventually Type I will be cut from both ends, their expenditures will rise, job security will become low and incomes will shrink!
Let us look at Type V. They will probably pay handsomely for either feeling healthier or looking younger and for goods delivered at their homes (especially medication and homecare). They will have limited buying capacities, almost nil debt-servicing and no financial support from others.
Finally let us look at Type III. Their incomes and bonuses can increase even more since, in the new scenario, the business will achieve far greater revenues as well as profits than their current levels. They are really keen in seeing social networking succeed in a big way as they have envisioned, which will probably catapult them to the safe havens of oligarchy.
People can start behaving bizarrely …
One, all the analytics which is promised by the technology gurus may not be delivered. The verbal commentaries, one of the most difficult things to be analyzed digitally, could pose serious challenges. And the industries may not buy this beta-version of the ‘panacea’. There may not be a single corporate success story to ride on.
Two, in spite of the industries buying them, their revenues may not increase. The social- networking friends may not buy that many or that often, as had been expected by business. They may ‘like’ yet may not have enough money to buy those. Or their social identities may be fake and may not yield any orders.
Three, the rise of the oligarchs may be opposed by the commoners with whistle blowers like WikiLeaks and other sting operators, within various financial and government agencies, making public some of their confidential and sensitive documents. Hence those friends can turn into real foes.
Four, the disposition of teenagers can suddenly change and they can start to vehemently oppose the gradual transformation of democracies into plutocracies. Unemployment problems may become almost impossible to solve by current government policies.
Five, there may be a revival of interest in art, culture and yoga and people can start rejecting war in every form and also the pretexts that their governments may keep on citing to convince them.
Six, people can start acting ‘unsmart’, drive less cars and use less mobile phones, grow organic crops and return to living simple lives in villages. This may sound too extreme to actually happen but we have never had the opportunity to see the interactions and reactions of such huge numbers of educated people (Facebook alone currently has almost 7% of the world population as its users) connected in real time on a single social platform!
How can they alter the planned outcomes envisioned by business?
One thing for certain is that Type III profits will come down considerably.
Type I may see an upsurge of small entrepreneurs.
Type II, and this can be the real difference from the current trend, will also start earning early as small entrepreneurs Type I (they could choose professions as small organic farmers, manufacturers, teachers, tourist guides, therapists, nurses, social welfare workers, zoo keepers, horticulturists, energy producers from non-conventional sources, manufacturers of eco-friendly automobiles etc. They may join politics too). Their debt burdens may slowly reduce and they may leave hedonism and embrace discipline in their lives.
Type IV may become Type I and join the workforce.
Type III may find women to be more efficient and loyal than their counterparts.
Type V may start thinking about themselves as more capable than just fending for their medical and home- care expenses which can become cheaper because of lower margins being charged on price. More importantly, they can reduce their debt too and that can perhaps bring back some of those who had earlier deserted them.
Finally our Type I cavaliers would feel much less pressure both from their families as well as their employers. Their debt- serving burden in all likelihood will be lower and their revenue targets at the workplace will definitely be less steep than before, hence, allowing them some opportunities to smile and enjoy life at large :-)
So what’s the conclusion? …
What are the chances of social networking being the socio-economic panacea of twenty-first century?
Frankly speaking, if anyone of us knew the answer, he would have already become a billionaire. In fact, some people think the other way round. Those who have already become billionaires think that they have found out the panacea and it is a matter of time for them to be proven right. We need to wait and see what happens finally! It is a crazy world we live in today and those who are really keen in hitting the bull’s eye must go and see an astrologer or a statistician, and I would rather enjoy life than try to gaze at in the crystal- ball and predict the future of thee world; its politics and economics which are more complex than the theories which many of the stalwarts in business are hurriedly trying to force-fit.
So what may be the future of social networking?
It has already involved a huge investment to create this infrastructure and even though it is valued at several billions of dollars, but it can either succeed or plummet drastically down if the industries fail to get inebriated enough by its magic. Business is going hammer-and-tongs with its orchestrated epistemic shots but whether it can cure the global financial crisis nobody can tell. On the social side, regardless of the success or failure, the real friends will eventually be lost for free, similar to the way they were locked into this virtual friendship.
What can remain as a part of it will be the direct marketing chains, loyalists earning reward points or real incentives for references or for solving product support issues. And those people who will be marginalized by analytics will move on from one free online resource to the next one.
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As the article demonstrates, CrazyLazy is a gifted analyst of society.
Whenever he sees himself on the side of majority he feels it’s time to start worrying... He does not relish having high hopes about life as long as there is at least one to live with ... He believes that honesty still has its place in people's mind ...now and even later.