Kierkegaard and Social Media

By

Sandeep Gupta

The present age is an age of advertisement, or an age of publicity: nothing happens, but there is instant publicity about it.

These words, reverberating with contemporary echoes, were penned by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 165 years ago, in 1846.

 What about today?

“What’s On Your Mind” is expected to be typed into a text box and splashed across your universe facing wall. The most philosophical of one’s thoughts need to be crammed into a maximum of 140 characters. In such a world, where the instant trumps depth of thought, and the wisdom of crowds seem to be the favoured buzzword, those bearded sages of old would most probably shake their heads in unified disillusion. Sartre may have worried at the ascendency of nothingness over being, Schopenhauer may have sensed the tilting of the scales more in favour of representation with the relinquishment of will. Descartes may have sworn by the name we have given to our editorial ‘Blogito Ergo Sum’ and Nietzsche may have had his own blog ‘Thus Tweeted Zarathustra’.

However, when we talk of Social Media and discuss the importance of the same in the world of rebellion and activism, the most disgruntled soothsayer would probably have been Søren Kierkegaard.   

Apart from contributing heavily to the corpus of Christian ethics, much of the work of this ephemeral thinker, who passed away at the young age of 42, dealt with the issues of living as a ‘single individual’ and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. Obviously, this individualistic approach to life can itself be difficult in the day of the synchronised electronic herd.

However, the major problem of Kierkegaard was with the new media of the mid nineteenth century that was growing fast and sharing ideas as never before – which is now called the traditional press.

Newspapers and magazines filled the market, and people assembled in the numerous coffee houses that sprang up to give voice to their brimming opinions. According to the Danish philosopher, these opinions were already moulded and coloured by print.

What pissed the thinker off was the universal growth of opinions of each and everyone without visible commitment, the proliferation of intellectual tourists in every sphere without the pains and experiences necessary to foray deep into the level of accomplishment.

According to him, this creation of the public sphere through the spread of the press and coffee houses, with the ideas and opinions led to a gamut of risk free, third party commentary, unreal individuals who are never united, yet stick together as a combined whole, a corpus, who form weak ideas. Without the involvement in the actual action, it became a society spending their hours on reflection. By reflection, Kierkegaard meant a mirror in which one derives one’s individuality by imitating others.

According to him, this was destined to become a realm of idle talk where spectators merely pass the word along. The public sphere promoted ubiquitous commentators who deliberately detached themselves from the local practices out of which specific practices grew, forming a world where everyone had a opinion and comments on public matters without the necessity of first-hand experience or responsibility. According to him, the press and coffee houses led to public demoralisation, by building up lazy ideas and opinions while rarely providing the urge to act on them, often resulting in people so overwhelmed with views that any forthcoming action was postponed indefinitely.

 For Kierkegaard, one of the essential ingredients of useful speech was the capability to remain silent. And nineteenth century press and coffee house gatherings diluted the distinction between remaining silent and speaking. Quick spiritual and intellectual fixes offered by the media was the real target of his critique, which took away the risk associated with deep and authentic commitments which was the root of meaningful endeavour. Instead of dealing with fomenting armchair public opinion about every possible issue, it was more of trail and error, the failures of certain courses of real action, triumphs studded with lesson-filled disappointments which were the building blocks of wisdom.

And what would he have made of the Web 2.0? Is not the Social Media a hybrid of press and coffeehouse on super-steroids? Where anyone can join interest groups to discuss topics endlessly from the comfort of one’s couch or cubicle? Where the yellow journalism Kierkegaard was so critical of reaches new levels of accomplishment with anyone posting anything and sometimes the authentic press mooching off such unverified posts?

“It is frightful that someone ... can set any error into circulation with no thought of responsibility and with the aid of dreadful disproportioned means of communication,” he observed in Journals and Papers. One cannot help but feel a chilled shiver down one’s spine on reading the words written one and a half century back. Additionally, ubiquity of the Net and Social Media, the easy access and the countless cycles of pseudo-social consciousness and hollow discussions make us wonder whether what Kierkegaard’s own FaceBook or Twitter acconts would have looked like.

Information abounds and choices are aplenty on the Net now. The social responsibility causes, environmental issues, and even underground rebel groups are easily available and can be joined at the click of a mouse. However, the philosopher would have had a different spin on the Web. The very ease of making commitments for him would lead to the breakdown of the ethical sphere into the connected herd known as the public.

It is one thing for existing and committed activists, who are risking their lives on a daily basis in opposition to the regime, to embrace Facebook and Twitter and use them for their goals. Kierkegaard would have agreed that their commitment was authentic. However, it is a completely different matter for individuals with passing or no interest in the issue to come out clicking all cylinders to save the world. This is exactly the kind of shallow commitment the Dane detested. Millions of FB posts and tweets flew through the cyberspace when thousands of Egyptians risked bullets on the streets of Cairo, complete with smileys and the ‘Walk like an Egyptian’ quips. Yet, many believed that they had played a role in the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Søren Kierkegaard  predicted this phenomenon when he wrote, “some political virtuoso might ... write some manifesto ... and bring it about that the audience believed that it had actually rebelled.” However, in reality, no one has really toppled an authoritarian  government by cracking jokes about the guillotine in their drawing rooms.

Today, the iRevolutionaries tend to stay on their sofas till their iPad batteries run out. It does not really matter whether the causes they fight for are dedicated or real, as long as they are easy to find on FB or Google. It is through the number of friends and the types of causes that one supports that online social status is built on. No wonder psychologists have now discovered a high positive correlation between social networking and narcissism.

In words of Kierkegaard, the current age can be summed up as one with a growing tendency to be enthusiastic for a moment only to decline back into indolence, something everyone who has been invited to a cause on Facebook can identify with.

Sandeep Gupta is the protagonist of The Best Seller by Arunabha Sengupta

A struggling author, he makes his living as, among others, a ghost blogger, a tai chi teacher, an undercover reporter and a stand in consultant 

Archived Authors on Web 2.0

by

Chris Henderson

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World:

Aldous Huxley wrote The Brave New World in 1932 and looked back at it in his essay The Brave New World Revisited in 1958. Those years are way back in the realms of the prehistoric if one considers the instant by instant history that defines Web 2.0.
Even the futuristic devices in his tale fortelling the future remain quaintly analogue. Well, he was after all not a science fiction writer but social commentator who set this tale in the days to come.

In the 1932 classic, which has visions of a consumerist and robotic society, he comes closer to the world of today than many would give him credit for, in spite of the absence of the digital.

While in no way is this article suggesting that he foretold the world to be with stunning accuracy, there are certain approximations which, nonetheless, are striking.

The entire premise of the Brave New World, a futuristic world in which human beings go through their lives in a celebration of youth, entertainment and hedonistic sexual gratification, hinges on an enormous initiative of manufactured consent. Brainwashed from birth and across generations, they have come to accept the consumerist culture as an axiomatic truth while questions raised about this way of life is not only discouraged, but also considered freakishly antisocial.

However, the most interesting feature that strikes me is the concept of hypnopaedia. Consumerist and other acceptable dictums repeated over and over from infancy, for years while the individual sleeps, ultimately results in a human being who is one of his group, a team player, someone who knows what is the accepted right and wrong. In other words, a  model citizen leading a model life.

While the trailing paedia in the coinage points to delicious parallels in the connected world, it is the concept of numbing the idle brain with a series of external agents that seems to be more than prophetic, especially so in the world of Hollywood, You Tube, Corporations and Uncle Sam.

Some of the slogans that are used in the hypnopaedic treatment almost echo the current world.

“Stability, Identity, Community.”

“Old clothes are beastly. We always throw away old.”

“I do love flying, I do love flying.”

“Hug me till you drug me.”

“A gram (of hallucinogen) is better than a damn.”

An idle consumerist society, tuned in to entertainment readily available, addicted to sexual gratification, the common thrills of intoxicants, consumption and the ersatz, simulated adventure of travel.

iPod plugged to the the ears, surfing on the hand held smart phone, videos of Shakira and Lady Gaga on YouTube, a backpacking visit to Europe, and the hallucinogen of FaceBook.

You look at the Russian youth or the connected American junkie. It is a stable world with unique identity fostered by a socially networked community  – where human values and reading Shakespeare are indeed seen as the traits of a Savage. As was depicted in the masterwork by Huxley.

Stability, Identity, Community

Kurt Vonnegut : Cat’s Cradle

In Cat’s Cradle Kurt Vonnegut speaks, among other things, of Bokononism - a religion based on foma or harmless untruths, written in the form of calypsos.

While Bokononism is full of its own tantalisingly funny terminology, which may give one a vin-dit (a sudden shove towards Bokononism) or help one understand the connected world (busy busy busy busy - words Bokononists whisper upon witnessing an example of how interconnected everything is), the one word which gives a stunning description of current online activism and cause connected communities is granfalloon.

A granfalloon, defined by the Bonkomist lexicon, is a false karass.

A karass is a group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God's will.

A granfalloon, in contrast to a karass, is another group of people who outwardly choose or claim to have a shared purpose or identity, but whose mutual associations are meaningless.

Some of the examples that Vonnegut provides in his masterpiece are – the Communist Party, the Daughters of American Revolution, the General Electric Company or any nation anytime anywhere.

The last example is further stressed in the following passage - they had found a can of white paint, and on the front doors of the cab Frank had painted white stars, and on the roof he had painted the letters of a granfalloon: U.S.A.

To define a granfallon, Bokonon, the founder of Bokononism, uses the calypso “If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.”

One wonders what Bokonon or Vonnegut would have written or sung about the Web 2.0 slacktivists, whose idea of being connected to a cause is a series of  forwards, likes and retweets, with smileys, on issues of supposed unifying social issue. “Walk like an Egyptian :-)”, 13 Likes
Busy Busy Busy Busy has changed to Like Like Like Like

In Bokonomist terms, this is inviting pool-pah.

William Styron: Sophie’s Choice

Sophie Zawitowska, the Polish survivor of Auschwitz, overhears a group of young American students talking of their travails with psychoanalysis and their therapists.

It is 1947, the embers of the recent mindless mayhem still glow hot, sparks visible every time one ventures a tentative glance over the shoulder a wee bit back in time. The period is also one of growing fascination with psychoanalysis.

Sophie speaks to the narrator, twenty two year old Stingo , summing up the superficial sadness of the smug students while lolling on the Coney Island beach. In doing so she uses a wonderful expression, so  appropriate even sixty four years later in analysing of the legions of online FaceBook slacktivists.

“Unearned Unhappiness,” she says.

And through the magic of Styron’s storytelling, we are convinced that she knows what she is talking about. 

*

Chris Henderson is a fictitious character who appears in Arunabha Sengupta's The Best Seller.  He is an aspiring author and lives in Pasadena, California

Soccer Net Working

by Senantix

After Barack Obama completed his landmark march to the White House in 2008, few questioned his right to the most powerful position in the world. The punch-line identifying him echoed “Yes We Can” all around, and the populace overwhelmingly agreed.

Analysts at Edelman Research put the campaign leading up to his victory under the microscope and are of the opinion that he won by “Converting everyday people into engaged and empowered volunteers, donors, advocates – through social networks, email advocacy, text messaging and online video.”

Indeed, his run to the Oval office was perhaps the broadest use of the social media for social change – leveraging on its key channel MyBarackObama.com – a more focused version of Facebook. It was not only a platform where his followers could keep a tab on the development of the campaign, it was also a place where they could connect, interact and collaborate.  It did not only capture the attention of people, but enabled them to team up as activists. With this, the presidential candidate was able to garner 5 million supporters on fifteen different social networks. By November 2008, Obama had close to 2.5 million Facebook supporters, out-performing Republican opponent John McCain by nearly four times. On Twitter he had more than 115000 followers, more than 23 times that of McCain. People spent 14 million hours watching campaign related Obama videos on YouTube, with more than 50 million viewers. The wonder of YouTube stems from people not having to be forced to watch the action whenever Television channels decided to beam it. They could log in at their own convenience and click a button to follow the proceedings.

Obama, thus, did not only paint the American political history in hitherto unknown shades, he also ensured that political campaigns would never be the same again. Activism was mobilised online, with a prominent central hub which grew more and more powerful as more and more connections passed through it.

Very few high stake elections will henceforth be fought without a decisive battle, even war, carried out in the virtual world of social networks.

A common room where one can reach millions of connected individuals, Social Networks are the recently discovered gold mines of the seekers of high office.

However, what did this very tribe of ambitious men and women do in the days prior to the Web 2.0 revolution? Did they try to hitch themselves to some other popular frenzy which gathered together hundreds of thousands of potential votes?

They have always done it. From traditional media to the silver screen, no popular vista of modern life has been spared political colouring.

That brings us to the one phenomenon of the modern world, the paramount passion of the greatest cross-section of the world population. The hundreds of millions who throng to the stadium-temple, are glued to television sets for a vision of their gods or listen to the transistor for the description of their feats oblivious to all else. Their idols descend on the turf, and blaze the flanks through the magic of their invaluably insured feet, firing the imagination of countless many, using their divine skills to guard one their citadel and to put a round checked ball through the three straight posts into the net of the opposition.

1978 - Kempes for Argentina

For ninety minutes, or a series of ninety such minutes during a high profile tournament, the football fan ceases to be a distinct individual whom life weighs down with mundane problems. While the pagan mass lasts, the fan is many. Along with his brother worshippers, he shares the conviction that they are the best, the adversaries are cheats, all referees are crooked. He seldom says “My team plays today.” It is always “We play today.” He is certain that as the twelfth player he wills the winds to propel the ball into and away from the posts when opportunities and dangers present themselves. He is a molecule of the soccer swarm, one of the many specks that create the summation of souls that rise and fall with the fortunes of the team. An entity that is connected by one singular target – known fittingly as the Goal.  Linked by the allegiance to the abstract concept of a team, the devotion to one hero, and the unifying passion for the beautiful game.

Borges

Before the coming of the internet, was there a better way to target a substantial mass of humanity than setting sights on the soccer fans?

Like God, soccer inspires devotion among believers and distrust among intellectuals.

In London 1902, Rudyard Kipling trivialised soccer and those who contended their souls with “the muddied oafs at the goals”. Seventy six years later, Jorge Luis Borges gave a lecture on the subject of immortality at the same hour when his native Argentina was playing its first game in the 1978 World Cup, a trophy ultimately they won through the brilliance of Mario Kempes and others.

Conservative intellectuals deride the game through their staunch belief that soccer-worship leads people to think with their feet, which is the only way they can think, fulfilling their dreams with primitive ecstasy, with animal celebration overtaking human reason. And, leftist intellectuals denigrate the sport because it castrates masses with cheap entertainment, derails their revolutionary ardour. The spread of soccer is an imperialist trick to keep oppressed peoples in an eternal childhood, unable to grow up.

However, the mass appeal and the congregation of millions of connected people always made soccer very much a population goldmine to be tapped, much like social networks of today.

During the summer of 1916, in the midst of the Great War, an English captain named Neville launched a military attack by kicking a ball. Leaping out from behind a parapet which was serving as his cover, he chased the ball toward the German trenches. His regiment, hesitant at first, followed the leader. The captain was blasted by the gunfire, but England conquered that no-man’s land and celebrated the victory as the first of British soccer on front lines. Signs of galvanising power of the game was indisputable.

Berlusconi with Kaka and the rest of AC Milan

The saga continues to very modern times. Silvio Berlusconi, whom The Economist hailed  as the man who screwed an entire country, was the owner of AC Milan when he won the 1994 Italian elections with chants of Forza Italia from the stadiums. He had promised to save Italy the same way that he had saved Milan’s all time champion football superteam, and voters forgot that several of his own companies were on the very verge of ruin.

In between Neville and Berlusconi, there have been plenty of connection between soccer and politics. Politicians and dictators have frequently exploited fans by creating a link of identity, and activists have forged new ways of spreading their cause by aiming for goals other than the one under the crossbar.

In 1934 and 1938, Italy won the World Cup in the name of the fatherland and Mussolini. The players started and finished each game by saluting the crowd with their right arms outstretched, giving three cheers for Italy. That way, Mussolini’s  personal end with severed gonads seem to prove that in the end the ball game is a great leveller.

Italian Salute in the 30s

For the Nazis, soccer was a matter of the state. A monument in Ukraine still commemorates the players of the 1942 Dynamo Kiev team, shot to death in their jerseys because of committing the insane crime of defeating Hitler’s squad in a local stadium, in spite of warnings – “If you win, you die.”

So, we have some splendid examples of activism through soccer as well.

In 1934, while Bolivia and Paraguay were fighting the bloody war of Chaco, disputing a pathetic piece of deserted land, the Paraguayan Red Cross formed a team which travelled across Argentina and Uruguay, playing exhibition matches, raising enough money to attend to the wounded of both the armies.

Franco on the field

Later, in 1937, when General Franco, with the help of the other two stalwart leaders in this narrative, Hitler and Mussolini, was busy bombing the Spanish Republic to smithereens, a Basque team was playing matches in Europe, and Barcelona had crossed the Atlantic to entertain crowds in USA and Mexico. The Basque government had sent the Euzkadi team to publicise their cause and raise funds for defense. Barcelona’s president had already fallen to Franco’s bullets. Both these teams embodied democracy under siege.

The Franco dictatorship, however, found an unbeatable travelling embassy under the name Real Madrid. Winning four Spanish Leagues in a row, five European Cups and one Intercontinental, the team charmed spectators everywhere. Jose Solis, one of the political honchos of the regime, voiced his gratitude in 1959 saying, “Thanks to you, people who used to hate us now understand us.” Soccer network was manipulated by the dictators as well.

Censorship of soccer activism has also taken place. Most of the players of Barcelona and Basque, after their heroic games in the face of invasion, could not come back to Spain. After the Republic was defeated, FIFA declared them to be in rebellion and threatened them with permanent suspension. Some of them managed to find positions in Latin American teams.

Puskas

In 1950, when the Hungarian star Kubala – later a member of the all conquering Real Madrid – formed a national team in exile, it earned him a two year suspension from FIFA. When other Real Madrid stars – Puskas, Czibor and Kocsis among them – played for another Hungarian team in exile after Soviet tanks had crushed the uprising at the end of 1956, FIFA suspended them for over a year.

When in 1958, in the midst of the war of independence, Algeria formed a soccer team, it had in its line up players of the calibre of Makhloufi, Ben Tifour and others who were professionals in France. Blockaded by the colonial power, Algeria only managed to play against Morocco. The obliging opponent was promptly kicked out by FIFA for playing a renegade and unauthorised national side. The association also banned the Algerian team, while the French soccer league blacklisted the players, preventing them from returning to professional league. However, when Algeria won independence, the French had no alternative but to call up the players who delighted the fans.

With the coming of social networking and the commercialisation of the game, the goal of political propaganda can be achieved through other strategies for man to man collaboration. The referee may not continue to be the only whistle blower in the universal game that is played out.

However, the parallels are striking, and there are lessons to be learnt, if only to prevent foul play and penalties leading to undesirable sudden deaths.

*

Click here for the sports blog of Senantix - the avatar of Scroll co-editor Arunabha Sengupta on blogosphere

Who Moved my Revolution?

by 

Simon van der Wiel

Download an audio recording of Hilary Clinton’s Freedom of Internet Speech.  Or stream in some other internet inspired rebellion manifesto by current day thinkers represented by the likes of Jared Cohen, or visionaries such as Francis Fukuyama . The last named once proudly proclaimed 1989 to be the end of history.  

Close your eyes, forget the context and float away in the reassuring ramble. “Information freedom ... foundation for global progress ... tools in the hands of people for advancement .... deficiencies in the current market for innovation ... harnessing the power of connection technologies ... long term dividends from modest investments in innovation ... flat world ... connected communication ... Web 2.0”

The excessively empty jargon sounds like eerie approximations of McKinsey-speak. One can almost sense the darkened conference room, projectors beaming meaningless charts and data, with superfluous smatterings of inane inconsequential information on the screen.

The more Washington leans towards the Silicon Valley in rather puerile efforts to electronically re-simulate the samizdat operations of the Cold War era, the more the techno-mingled-drivel of such talks echo the colossal ignorance that reverberate across the corporate CEO meetings.

It is of little surprise that the Freedom of Internet speech of Hilary Clinton has been tagged by some alternative media sites with the keyword ‘ignorance’. Not unjustified. Asked about Twitter a few days before the Iranian revolution broke out, the leading lady had responded, “I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter, but evidently it’s very important.”

If one pauses for a moment of sanity amidst the furious beeps and clicks of a connected concept of cyber utopia, one cannot help but shudder at the thought of the world being liberated by leaders with self confessed unawareness of the very tools they claim to be magic pills.

We see at work the same wishful thinking with belligerent yet bird-brained buzzwords that characterise millions of Senior Management meetings. Only, in this case, the decision makers are people with phenomenal power, with actual ability to influence the world, who have in their hands technologically advanced and extremely interconnected tools that they do not understand. As discussed in another article, an email sent by one such ill advised policymaker to the administrators of a Social Media Tool can actually compromise the freedom and lives of actual dissidents across the world. Scary? It indeed is.

While the phrase ‘Internet Freedom’ is searched more frequently from Washington area than Iran and the fragmented former Soviet Union nations put together, the policy makers are gaga about the new social media avatars of the samizdat press and the Radio Europe movements that supposedly managed to crumble the Berlin Wall, and folded the Iron Curtain into storage rooms of a half remembered past.

Buzzwords – another very corporate phenomenon – raise their noisy heads with the ingratiating yet convincing smiles. The architectural magnificence and geographical prominence of the Great Wall of China lends itself to the creation of misleading metaphors such as Great Firewall. The legions of politicians for whom 1989 is a self proclaimed feather in semi-thinking caps, pronounce aphorisms influenced by another Wall:“As networks spread around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in places of visible walls.”

Leaders who have smugly fitted  into the political power-works by manipulating the bipolar world prior to 1989 harp that the Iron Curtain has been replaced by “a new information curtain descending across much of the world” where it is claimed that “viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of the day.”

The dangers of such proclamations and the pitfalls of celebrating bloggers as modern day dissidents have been discussed in other articles of the issue, notably by my lovely friend Shruti Rattan. Here I am looking at the unnerving similarity of these declarations with similar decrees in the corporate world – where each and every company of the day is trying to chisel its social networking strategy into a silver bullet with the same chronic short term thinking that is the signature of the industry and, perhaps, the cause of cycles of booms and busts.

In the mid to late 90s, the software world was being steered by senior management made up of experts in third generation languages like COBOL. Simultaneously, there was a lot of excitement about the relatively new Object Oriented Technologies.  There lie in several archives of the industry huge quantities of code written in new generation syntax and semantics, feebly powered by old, procedural design. The platform of coding was changed to imprint the stamp of progress, but the erstwhile experts who engineered the changes often did not have the knowhow to benefit from the features of fourth generation object oriented languages. Enormous systems still chug along on these Jurassic algorithms in the then cutting edge outfit. The result has been a huge waste of money, manpower and efficiency.

In current events, we witness a similar trend in the political scenario. Historical parallels and inviting metaphors can make for great rhetoric, but it is ridculous to base decisions on wordplay and play havoc with the lives of other people.

Reusing the so called best practices of the pre 1989 era, implementing a blanket model that has supposedly worked in remarkably different conditions – along with a bull headed initiative to tweak every innovation into such propaganda are pathetic parallels of the uncommitted world of corporate cubicles.

While the oedipal obstinacy to come out of the cold war parentage while dealing with completely different global situations can be of professional interest to Freudian analysts, basic questions still remain about whether the samizdat offering of leaflets, propaganda, books, photocopies, Radio Europe and so on were actually driving forces behind the fall of communism. There have been arguments that people in GDR were more interested in shows like Miami Vice than in assembling for protests. Was it really the underground photocopiers, or was it the chain of events leading to plummeting oil industry and rising food prices that led to the wall going down in 1989? We are not discussing that here, although it would not be ill-advised to pause and think about it before tweeting propaganda.

In other articles we have pointed out why the current platform of Social Media, with its messy electronic footprints, is far more dangerous for the activist than Samizdat.  We have also dealt with the online version of slacktivists, reverse propaganda and the effect of cheap entertainment triumphing over dissidence. Here I would like to add that millions of connections between millions of people on the internet is a very, very complicated affair. Generalised optimistic jargon filled proclamations about cyber utopia and the messianic merits of the Socially Networked World can be fine for fifteen minutes of spotlight. But, no one can honestly predict the future of such a connected world yet.

The complexity of the electronic mesh that entangles everyone consists of too many parameters. It is prone to the chaotic phenomenon where small changes create immense domino effects. It is impossible to predict which way such a connected world will react to the ripples, through integration or falling to bits.

Till such a time that we can form an informed prediction in this information chaos, it may be a good idea to take the deafening optimistic sound and fury about cyber rebellion with the same cynical nonchalance with which we attend management review meetings.

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Simon van der Wiel is a fictonal character from Arunabha Sengupta's novel The Best Seller.

Half Dutch, half Irish and brought up in the West Coast, he works for an Indian firm and interacts with Dutch clients.

His blogs dealing with Corporate Circus, some from the novel and some extrapolated from the storyline, can be found at Blog of Simple Simon

Debugged - Swarms Caught in the Net

By

Suprakash Roy

A lot of the mystique of the Social Media and the magical powers ascribed to it stem from a paradigm shift in the nature of organisation.

Through FaceBook, Twitter, Wikipedia and common open source platforms, we find the weird phenomenon of strangers, otherwise unconnected people, collaborating with each other without any economic incentive, with no central organisation or management. For a twentieth century citizen of the world, the products of social engineering built in infinitesimal packets by such collaborated effort of thousands is indeed a major shift in the way the world works.

The question of economic incentive and the lack thereof have been discussed in other places in this issue.

In this article we look at the pros and cons, the scope and limits of organisation without organisation, and to do this we observe other intelligent life forms which have been doing this ever since the advent of life on earth.

A lot of lessons on the unusually connected world, the combined power of thought and mass reactions can be deduced from the world of smart swarms. If we look at the working lives of ants, termites, birds, fish, locusts, caribou and other creatures, we get several insights into the world of organisation with central leadership. And from thence, I will try to infer how much of all that is possible in the world of birds and bees can be replicated in the human world of cyberspace.

People have  a problem in deducing how a lot of weakly linked efforts that are independent and chaotic in seclusion can produce phenomenally useful products. However, that is the hallmark of Social Engineering.

Wikipedia is a sterling example of the wonders of such collaboration, a fascinating integration of infinitesimal contributions across innumerable individuals – a freely editable, yet unregulated platform which has overtaken the scholastic institutional importance of Encyclopaedia Britannica and others. Contributors are often unnamed, identifiable by only a cryptic sequence of dots and digits signifying IP Address.

Amazon.com, a behemoth retail in its own right, is also a compelling study of how individuals unknown and at diverse ends of the world can influence one another through same or similar purchases, reviews, lists, tagging and discussions. The same can be witnessed in thousands of online spaces from Expedia to TripAdvisor to FaceBook groups.

The cascading effect of the connected world is also witnessed in Google.com, where popularity of search results propel them to the top, leading to more and more hits when subsequent people start searching similar keywords.

It is as if there is global consciousness at work, decisions influenced not by individual thought, but a combination of infinite nuggets of ideas and opinions.

Some of these phenomena are mirrored in striking parallels by the animal world.

When a group of ants forage for food, one can witness a lot of chaotic and unstructured individual movements all around, which somehow converge into effective and surprisingly economic gathering of food, with almost esoteric communication about dangers that lurk in the form of hungry predators in the neighbourhood.

Scientific studies have discovered that this communication is not just a result of messages passed by the rubbing of antennae. The ants use a communicating method that is very similar to the algorithms of page hits and external links used by Google and other engines. Whenever an ant leaves the nest and scours for food, it secretes pheromones that mark the path traversed. And when food is discovered, the ant comes carrying the booty back to the nest using exactly the same path, and hence the pheromone trail gets stronger. Pheromone tracks traversed once are lighter and evaporate with time, and thus only the successful paths retain the strong group history of foraging. Ants who venture out later follow the tracks which have the strongest pheromone prints, leaving their own pheromone trail on them, thus managing in the trial and error methods to collectively converge onto the food. Maximum efficiency through information sharing without centralised management. It is remarkably the same way that page hits and independent links dictate the subsequent search results on Google and other search engines. The same way that previous Amazon sales influence more purchase.

Moving onto the world of termites, we see remarkable gifts at building their elaborately engineered and extremely intricate homes popularly known as ant hills. These residences take years to be built and have complex indoor features, with air temperature regulatory ducts and channels, proper living and community quarters. Not only are these magnificent structures built through a series of chaotic movements without any leadership, the termites also demonstrate remarkable resilience in rebuilding entire sections damaged by external agents. Thousands of working insects just come together and do what is necessary, their individual movements as random as possible.

This remarkable self organisation is known as stigmergy. First introduced in 1959 by French Biologist Pierre Paul Grasse, it has now become an accepted term, which denotes indirect coordination between agents, with seemingly intelligent structures reacting to the immediate environment, without being in direct coordination or communication with one another, but producing something which is useful to all.

Termites carrying building material, start dropping their wares in random locations. When other termites, still bearing their building stuff, come across material already dropped, they simply start adding their load on the existing rudimentary components. And through repetition of the same principles, objects are placed on one another and soon scaffolding and structures develop.

None of the termites have a blueprint or plan. Every one of them react to the existing environment and pitch in to build something significant.

In more than remarkable ways, this resembles the method behind Wikipedia. In fact, in the Wikipedia article on stigmergy, it is stated that Wikipedia itself is an example of the phenomenon at work. Open source software projects are also examples of how this termite like technique can result in social engineering.

So, when we see that the cyber-connected modern species benefitting from behaviours which have their roots in insect habits, the question to ask is how far can the intelligent humans go with this? Can we not predict that these building blocks of information nuggets, these electronic tracks left by others pointing to important information, are gradually ushering an age of empowered information and knowledge aided liberation to democracy? Cannot rebellions be generated by the same principles of stigmergy?

To answer these, we need to turn towards the honey bees. When a swarm of honey bees change their accommodation to move to a new one, they send out representatives to scout for new locations, and through a unique mechanism, achieve consensus about the best possible new home. Invariably, their decision is always correct. They choose the best available option.

How do they do it?                                                                               

The scouting bees come across possible locations and zoom back to the group, communicating their respective finds to the rest of the group through elaborate dance movements. The other bees, attracted by the dances, go and check the places themselves, and come back to register their impressions to the remainder of the group. The best prospective accommodation, in due course of time, are sold to the others with a lot more prolonged dance routines and more and more of the swarm converge there. The inferior places soon find fewer supporters and consequently shorter dance recitals speaking of their merits to the rest of the group. Finally, majority triumphs, and the correct decision is made.

Can human beings replicate this sort of decision making?

If we look at historical data, from Mussolini to George Bush, from the Nazis to the Bay of Pigs, we can conclude that we are far inferior to the honey bees in decision making.

The difference between us, intelligent creatures, and them, the efficient insects, can be expressed in one principle of the celebrated process consultant Dr. Edward Deming. Constancy of purpose.

None of the honey bees, when coming back with the information about the prospective living quarters, dilute or overstate facts. None of the subsequent scouts who go to check out their finds approve or reject the locations because of personal dynamics with the other honeybees, hive lobbies or personal agenda. The insects have just one guiding purpose – to find the best place to relocate. This simplicity can guide them to the best possible decision, something that human beings can never aspire to.
Would a human scout in similar circumstances limit himself to communicating only the relevant positives of the location, or would there be much more noise and dance directed by personal ambition, power play, relationships and agenda?

Consider the example of the ants leaving their pheromone trail.  In principle, Google search results work in exactly the same way. However, there are dirty secrets in the history of the premier search engine of the world.

Not long ago, J.C. Penney started topping the search result listings not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

This lasted crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. When one typed in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

The search results were later discovered to have been manipulated by paying to have links placed on thousands of sites, each of which directly pointed to JCPenney.com, hence confusing the organic algorithm of Google and making sure that the retail chain was the most popular search result even when people were looking for recipes of Chinese food. Some of these sites were obviously created just to have the links pasted on them.
A spokesperson from J.C. Penney, however, categorically denied that this manipulation was done by the company. Well, let us leave it at that to look back and laugh later.

When the ants leave pheromone trails guiding others to find food, the solitary instinctive purpose of the community is to eat and survive. However, if a similar trail is left on the net by a group of individuals, it does not necessarily mean that the direction pointed to is correct. Noise is created about unsuccessful forays ever so often, in fields as diverse as politics, corporate world, marketing and religion. There is no guarantee that the strong pheromones will actually lead to food, or that vaporised tracks do not eventually lead to delicious offerings.

We see the manipulation worldwide. In Amazon, new products are launched for pre-order accompanied by hundreds of favourable reviews of supposed users. Underground companies exist which write hundreds of five star reviews for a price.  There are ways and means to pitchfork products into the best seller category by synchronising purchases by organised volunteers, to doctor the Amazon ranking system.  Once in the best seller list, the pheromone phenomenon takes over, maintaining the ranks and sales of the products.

The difference with the insect world is that human beings do not have the single goal of converging on and consuming the best product. There are various factions at work to influence decisions. Constancy of purpose is conspicuous by its sacrifice on the altar of multiplicity.

While Wikipedia is one of the success stories in this environment, with the termite like stigmergy showing signs of working in the human world, it is not totally secure from abuse.

The CIA is known to edit Wikipedia pages on a regular basis, an extension of their age old experiments for mind and thought control. In fact, the agency is so impressed by the power of the wiki, they use a similar application – Intellopedia – for collaborating on information sharing.

Additionally, there are individuals – uncountable millions – who make inserts with vested interests on popular pages to promote their products or ideas.

In such a world, the constancy of purpose that is so important for success of internet aided ventures and revolution, unfortunately, is most likely to be found in the fundamentalist, fanatic organisations, government funded and intelligence monitored wikis and blogospheres.

While Wikipedia, sharing technical knowledge about specific scientific and educational interests, Google Books and Open Source Software are definitely the boons of the modern connected world, liberation in form of truth and online activism to promote democracy still seem some way off because human beings are too intelligent for that.

Dr. Suprakash Roy appears in The Best Seller, a novel by Arunabha Sengupta.

A cyber conscious mender of minds, he is interested in the effect of the modern world of the internet and social networking in changing human behaviour.

His opinions, extrapolated from the novel can be found at : http://senantixshrink.blogspot.com

Mauled by walls! - A review of Social Network the movie

Aisoorya Vijayakumar

The lives of the young, the successful, and the aspiring, more often than not, have been chronicled in newspapers, television, and these days, social networking sites. People draw inspirations from these endowed souls and try emulating them, or at least try singing their glories. The accomplishments of these young achievers get as much prominence as their hideous and heinous acts of venom and revenge. Recall the stories of child prodigies and teenage entrepreneurs that you might have stumbled upon or come across and followed – be it stories of kids turned dazzling millionaires or simpler people who made it big by starting out on a smaller pursuit of making an extra buck.

Directed by David Fincher and written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network, based on The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, is one such tale – a tale of conflicting ambitions, seeking strength from misgivings, a tale of Facebook, the most popular social networking site of our times, a tale of betrayed trust and faltered friendship. It maps out the lives of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) – a genius kid who sets out to storm the world with his ideas on networking, Eduardo  Saverin (Andrew Garfield) – a svelte man of the world who has immense faith in his brainy friend’s mind-maps and decides to invest in his friend’s fledgling project, the Winklevoss twins(Armie Hammer) – full of righteous indignation and resentful bitterness at what to them is as an underhand blow by Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) – of loose morals and  - yet, or therefore - self-assured. This motion picture also brings to the fore how society succumbs to sensationalism and struggles not to be left behind – the urge to “belong”that skulks within us.

There are varyingly intense debates on how accurate The Social Network is in bringing out the truth, but as Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin said of the film, "[...] the movie was clearly intended to be entertainment and not a fact-based documentary.”

The storyline seems innocuous to begin with. Harvard nerd Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) dumps him. In retaliation he resorts to a nasty blogpost on her, in the process coming up with Facemash, a rating site that lets guys compare and rate girl students across the campus. This development is so predictably lurid that it catches on like wild fire. Before they realize it, Zuckerberg and his battalion of 3 have crashed Harvard’s servers. It is a mixed bag for the hero. Though he is served a 6-month academic probation notice, he also ends up impressing the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella). The latter three have been thinking about creating a Harvard-exclusive dating site called The Harvard Connection and they express their interests in using Zuckerberg’s programming expertise, in the process getting his verbal consent.
Zuckerberg meanwhile is coding The Facebook, a student-level social networking site, and gets funded by Saverin. He lets the Winklevosses and Narendra nurture hopes that the whizkid will soon start working on their site.
When Zuckerberg launches The Facebook, outrage follows, with the twins and Narendra convinced that he stole their concepts, leading to a decision to sue him together.
Zuckerberg meanwhile draws warmth from the seemingly frivolous Sean Parker, who, the movie claims, founded Napster, the music site that bombed out the record industry. Zuckerberg finds himself increasingly relating to Parker’s ideologies.
Parker’s helps Zuckerberg in many ways, from convincing him to drop the “The” from “Facebook” to fishing and hooking investors into the Facebook project.

This leads to an ugly turn of events with Saverin remaining skeptical about Parker’s character and callousness. When Zuckerberg orders him to move to Palo Alto, CA, so that he is “not left behind,” the warning so haunts him that he freezes the company accounts. Saverin labors tirelessly to pitch for advertising revenues for Facebook and to his horror learns that his shares in the company have been unfairly diluted to make room for new investors. He duly challenges Zuckerberg to a lawsuit. So, the creator of the Social Networking phenomenon goes through two lawsuits and settlements. At the end of it all,he is  left spending another evening by himself, his friend catching tool of little help in getting over his loneliness.

Characterization is a big positive for the movie.
Fincher and Sorkin seem to be masters at creating cold and ruthless characters and they are highly effective in that the characters do not try eliciting your sympathy or empathy. 
Zuckerberg is the beacon of this clammed-up clan in the movie, and his obsession and short attentive spans make us believe that he is suffering from a mild variant of Asperger’s syndrome  – he is remarkably expressive when situation demands, and disdainful and icy at other times. His razor-sharp wit and split-second decision-making are bizarrely admirable. 
Eisenberg nails the role with ease and elegance – restless eyes, appalling wardrobe, and a scathing tongue, he has played the ominous scenes so well so that you cannot help itching to smack him on the head for being such a creep. 
Saverin is perhaps the only human-side character in this disarray. Garfield, as Saverin, is endearing, with his helpless concern when he tells Facebook lawyers that Zuckerberg is usually careless about money, and needs to be looked after, and when with child-like astonishment when he tells Zuckerberg in the courtroom, “I was your only friend!” Gleamy-eyed Timberlake portrays Parker with his spontaneous humor and menacing villainy rolled into a bundle, and deserves kudos for the portrayal. The Winklevoss twins, embodied by Hammer, are surprisingly impactful. They, contrary to usual dogma that rich kids always bully nerds, consider themselves as the victims of a master manipulation by a nerdy geek. When realizing that they would find no support in Summer, the Harvard President, they show their spite very ably.

Aaron Sorkin’scriss-cross screenplay is riveting. Court-room to campus, motives to consequences, slights to anguish and distress, Sorkin covers it all. Dialogues are memorable for the most part and keep viewers engaged. Sandwiching emotions with ironies, the straight with the crooked,Fincher and Sorkin pack this gripping tale with coats of artful paradoxes which hold true in life as well. As the whole world gets smaller, brought to the monitor, as communications gets cheaper and simpler, individuals start getting rated on how others perceive them socially. How the number of friends one has on his or her list determines worth and success, how trivial gestures of acknowledgements – “liking” a picture, a wallpost, a comment – have taken up mammoth importance in the way people value relationships, the “wall, don’t call” phenomenon where age-old habits of catching up with friends have been assigned new dimensions.

As the movie ends, Zuckerberg sends his ex-girlfriend Erica a friend request on Facebook and refreshes his screen every few seconds to check for a response from her. We, like Zuckerberg, can’t help wondering if the future is as bleak to the rest of us as it is to him – lonely evenings of coffee and the computer, a million people to “like” what you say on Facebook but not a soul to listen to you.

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With diagonally opposite life trajectories vis-a-vis a masters in biotechnology and a career in technical communications, Aisoorya revels in being able to put down in words all that her mind registers. Forgetful beyond redemption and a hopeless insomniac, her blog world avatar is named "the Coffee Bean," inspired from the 'The egg, the carrot, and the coffee bean" story. She scribbles down her musings in her blog.