Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We hear a lot about how WhatsApp is used by small shop owners to run/increase their business. Dharmesh BA explores the limitations of this.   He starts with the tale of a guy running a beauty parlour. Ten years back, he could recommend Lakme sunscreen to a customer. No more. Women come to parlours with screenshots of Korean skincare brands seen on Instagram. If the parlour didn’t have it, they left. How could he possibly have every such brand? The solution? He joined a WhatsApp vendor group – wholesalers posting pics of various products. Our parlour owner would post some of those pics to his customer group – and order the ones in which his customers showed interest. “He wasn’t using WhatsApp for communication and marketing alone but turned it into a just-in-time inventory system.” ~~   Did you know there are 3 variants of WhatsApp? The one which you and I use. There’s WhatsApp Business which small businesses use with catalogs and auto-replies to customer chats. ...

In his wonderful book, How to Win an Indian Election , Shivam Shankar Singh dedicates a chapter on fake news. One of his points was this: “Most (rural) voters believed that being added to a political WhatsApp group gave them access to some kind of insider information.” Ergo, they think of it as a “credible source”. Something to be repeated/forwarded. We like to think that people vote based on rational, well thought reasons, but it’s all too often emotion based. Political parties know this and so try and exercise control over public opinion. By any and all means at their disposal. Fake news feeds perfectly into human psychology. All of us have our biases and views, and a message that aligns with that tends to be accepted without too much (any?) scrutiny. More problematically, it reinforces our bias/view setting off a vicious cycle. And the effect is practically irreversible: “The ugly truth is fake news does its job even when it is identified as fake.” WhatsApp, eve...