Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Throughout history, propaganda and hate have existed. Is social media just a new vehicles for what’s always been there? Or is it different/worse, asks Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus .   Yes, he says, social media is different. Because what is seen/shown is determined by non-humans, i.e., algorithms. AI has only added fuel to that fire, but the problem was visible even before AI. Algorithms, for example, auto-play the next video in your feed. They decide what to show you based on what you’ve already liked and seen. They show more of content that provokes outrage and anger. Why? Not out of malice, but because they want to maximize the time you spend online (More time online = more ads = more money). “In a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose.” This is why Harari believes that more information doesn’t always lead to good outcomes. It was true up to a point – countries with free press were better than dictator-controlled news systems. But no more.   Over ...

We got our 13 yo daughter her SIM card finally. Too early? Maybe (time will tell), but so many other kids seem to have gotten one at a much younger age. The other reason was the expectation that she’ll over-do/over-use whenever she gets her own phone number, and we will all take time to settle down on her usage (Time she spends? Which apps? Sharing her number with who? Learning to deal with unknown callers? Recognizing scamsters? etc). Better that the (team building) phases of ‘forming’, ‘storming’ and ‘norming’ get done long before she gets to 9 th standard, or so we hope. (I didn’t mention the ‘performing’ phase of team building because, well, she’s a teenager).   That’s the plan. But as Clausewitz said, “No plan survives contact with the enemy”, so let’s see… ~~   It reminded me of this recent Australian bill to set the minimum age for social media accounts at 16. Social media companies will be expected to enforce this law. My initial reaction was that this is a...

Recently, the Supreme Court expressed its concern wrt social media and called for guidelines to curb its misuse. While it’s easy to understand the concern, unfortunately there’s probably no solution to the problem. It’s not just about India. Democracies world over make the same noises about social media, but pretty much every time one of them has framed laws on the topic, they’ve solved very little and end up creating a host of new problems. The cure turns out to be the worse than the disease. But why should that be the case? Just because nobody’s framed the right laws doesn’t mean it can’t be done, right? Hmmm… check out Ben Thompson’s podcast on the topic. He starts with the backdrop to social media. Historically, most markets check bad behavior via price. But with the Internet, it’s all free, the tool called “price” became inapplicable as a check. Unlike older mediums, the Internet allows anyone to find like-minded people somewhere or the other. So even if the pe...

I remember reading somewhere that Facebook may not last more than one generation. That may be hard to imagine today, and no, it wasn’t based on the nothing-lasts-forever reasoning. Instead, it said teenagers don’t wants to have any contact with their parents, and so they’d never come onto Facebook, a site inhabited by people their parents’ age (shudder). Ergo, each new generation would have a new social media site, one that didn’t have parents on it! The other mega social media outlet, WhatsApp, is the way for parents of kids in the same class to interact with each other. As a kid, I remember how one struggled to get notes for days one missed at school. Even if you had a kid from the same class in the neighbourhood, you still had to hope that the other kid took notes. But now, thanks to WhatsApp groups, that’s not a problem: Ask and ye shall received photos of the notes taken by any other kid in class. I thought that was the only purpose of these class WhatsApp groups. Turns...

Everyone uses Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube. A good chunk of people call for those companies to “do something” about all that fake news and spewing of objectionable opinions and content. Yet another set curses all social media in general. But what exactly are we asking for? And who is to blame for all this? That’s the topic of this Ben Thompson podcast : content moderation. Is social media all bad? Take this instance where a couple of users discovered a bug in one of Apple’s devices and mailed in the details to Apple. The company ignored the bug report. Then people started slamming Apple on Twitter and bingo! The bug was fixed within 12 hours. Sometimes raising a stink is the only way to get things done, says Thompson. And yes, that “amplification power” of social media works both ways. But to say it is all bad is ridiculous. Or how about this time when the #MeToo movement was at its peak and a lot of women posted “All men are pigs” kind of comments on Facebook. Facebook su...

Santosh Desai cited an instance of a recent victim of social media, an award winning Indian chef in Dubai. Angry with the portrayal of Hindus as terrorists in an American serial, he let fly about Islam. There was a reaction to that, and at the end of it all, he’d lost his restaurant. Desai focuses the rest of the blog on why people land on these situations via social media, even though we’ve heard of others who paid a heavy price: “There is something about social media that encourages this kind of gratuitous sharing… In real life, we are aware of the fact that our actions and words have real world consequences. We are careful about expressing opinions, and are mindful of how others might react. This is why we back-bite (and not front-nibble) and why gossip is whispered, not shouted or broadcast. But on social media, we lose this self-imposed restraint, because of an illusion of detached distance.” With social media, on the one hand: “The opinions we hold about the world a...

Freddie deBoer laments that social media has turned everyone into cops: “Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something,  anything .” While it’s easy to see the problem, it’s hard to think of a way to “draw people away from the crack of social media” (Alan Jacob’s words). Because we are treading on very tricky ground here, namely the freedom of speech. Don’t we already see contradictory stances like this one described by Scott Alexander : “It’s okay for me to say that the President sucks, but  not  okay for you to say that I suck for saying that.” Besides, aren’t there scenarios where “out’ing” a person for their views can be a goo...

When we jet-ski’ed during our recent holiday in Vizag, we didn’t expect our 6 year-old to do it. After all, it looks scary, and she’d have to do it without either of us with her (it would only be her and the guy driving the jet-ski). And yet, she was persuaded to do it, not because she saw we had fun doing it, but because my wife dangled the carrot of bragging rights with her friends! So off she went. When she returned, I expected her to have that “I did it!” triumphant look and declaration. I could not have been more wrong. Instead, this is what she had to say: 1)       “Did you get a snap of me riding it?” Because her friends wouldn’t believe she’d done it, unless there was a pic to prove it. 2)      “When we go back to Bangalore, you must come down with me. With your phone. So I can show the pics to my friends.” So she could brag. I realized that she’s at that in-between age. Old enough to know that people lie about what ...

Most of continental Europe, and Germany in particular, is highly critical of the disruption that the Internet wreaks on traditional companies. One such article by Shoshana Zuboff was a criticism that a new form of capitalism is taking over the world. She calls it “surveillance capitalism”: “(It is) a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior.” And who’s doing this surveillance? The big bad wolf, aka the Internet companies. She elaborates what she means: “The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.” Why is it so easy for companies to collect data about us? “(Because it combines) the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism (of people).” It’s hard to argue with any of that. But typical of such criticisms, she then ...

I remember this text from my school book that described the sinking of the Titanic . From what little I remember, it seemed to be more about the human angle of the sinking (remember, this was before everyone knew the story thanks to Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet) than the why’s behind the sinking. The only “why” my school book mentioned was the obvious one: the collision with the iceberg. But as anyone who has watched Air Craft Investigations can tell you, such accidents never involve just one cause. It is usually a succession of multiple events, mistakes and bad luck that collectively results in disaster. Like this narrative . The events it mentions include there being more icebergs than usual; the ship going too fast since the captain wanted to beat the record; the ignoring of warnings that icebergs lay in the area; the steersman turned the ship in the wrong direction (the direction to turn the “rudder” is the opposite for sail ships and steam ships; and the world...

Why do articles have headlines? It’s a historical legacy, says John Herrman : “If your primary mode of story discovery is to look at a newspaper frontpage, you need headlines to tell you where to go. ” But as content discovery on the Internet happens more and more via social media, are article headlines still relevant? After all, as Jonah Peretti points out : “What do people add to a story when they share it? In some cases it’s better than the headline that our team wrote and in some cases shows why content matters to them.” In this new social media driving traffic world, Herrman says that article headlines can even be a source of confusion! “To click on “RIP Headlines,” a headline, and arrive at a page that has another headline, along the lines of “Why We Don’t Need Headlines,” is something we’re very used to doing. But it should feel like a form of deceit. It tells a reader, though you might not receive it this way, that the headline you were initially interested in is...

In 1884, Edwin Abbot wrote a book called Flatland about a 2D world whose inhabitants are geometric figures. Like squares and circles. One day, the square is visited by someone from the 3D world called Spaceland, a sphere. The sphere tries to explain the concept of a third dimension to the 2D square. And fails. In desperation, the sphere yanks the square out of Flatland and into the third dimension. The square is totally confused by what he now sees and says: “Either this is madness or it is Hell.” Eventually though, he comes around and tries to preach the “Gospel of Three Dimensions” to his fellow Flatlanders. But in vain. Plato’s Cave is a famous allegory on the same topic: the cave’s inhabitants are chained inside a cave such that they can only see shadows cast by the world outside the cave. So they interpret the outside world as being a certain way. When one of them makes his out of the cave, he behaves like the square of Flatland: confused and wanting to go back initiall...

Until recently, social media sites sometimes drove traffic to news sites (via links posted by their users). But now social media sites are displaying news content within their own apps. This changes the dynamics totally. Is news media becoming like wire services, wonders Ezra Klein : “Reporters will write their articles, and their content management system will smoothly hand them to Facebook, Snapchat, or Apple News…The publishers of tomorrow will become like the wire services of today, pushing their content across a large number of platforms they don’t control and didn’t design.” This transformation is just a reflection of the ground reality: “Twitter and Instagram and Vine and Snapchat and especially Facebook are larger concentrations of people than virtually any conceivable publication, and these people are clicking, tapping, scrolling and sharing more vigorously than people ever did on websites.” John Herrman points out that news companies that can “work out adve...

Nick Carr wrote an article about how every new communication medium forces political candidates to adapt and often changes the very nature of campaigning . In the 20 th century, it first happened with the advent of radio: “Politicians, used to bellowing at fairgrounds and train depots, found themselves talking to families in their homes.” Next came TV: “TV placed a stress on sound bites, good teeth and an easy manner. Image became everything, as the line between politician and celebrity blurred.” And now, he laments, comes social media. With that, “political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens” via the apps of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Further, the very nature of the political candidate is changing, he says: “If traditional print and broadcast media required candidates to be nouns—stable, coherent figures—social media pushes them to be verbs, engines of activity. Authority and respect don’t accumulate on social media; they have to be earn...

Mathew Ingram asked if there was a contradiction in decrying social media for making people lonely while simultaneously celebrating the value of the solitary experience of reading books. In response, Mike Masnick said he felt the reasons for the difference in stances on the two were: -          A generational thing : what Doughlas Adams called the “anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it” stance. -          Snobbishness : social media is idle chatter whereas reading is educative. Masnick then threw the question open to the (Internet) audience. Here are the comments I liked from that forum. One guy said it was “ because the intelligence level of books can pretty much always be appropriate to the person, social networking however almost always devolves into the lowest common denominator which is almost u...