Viswanathan K's Thoughts

A few days back, just before boarding her flight to Africa, Justine Sacco, the communications director for InterActiveCorp (IAC) tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” What happened next will make even warp speed seem like a crawl. “A mob with 140-character pitchforks” sprang up, as Nick Bilton described it . Her tweet “set off an avalanche of fury — on Twitter, on Facebook and in the news media across the globe”, as Jeff Bercovici put it . 12 hours later, IAC fired Sacco (12 hours was also the duration of her flight). That’s the pace of the Internet for you. So many others tweet idiotic and offensive things. So why did Sacco evoke such a strong reaction? Mostly because she was not a nobody: “Justine’s professional affiliation with billionaire Barry Diller and his well-known companies made her seem important, not just some random crank; a number of other ill-advised tweets provided fresh fodder and the outline of a caricature; her j...

The second Harry Potter book had this blurb:  “I’ve yet to find a child who can put it down. Magic stuff.” Considering how popular the series became with adults and kids, and made JK Rowling the first billionaire author in history, it’s easy to laugh at that blurb. Only kids can’t put it down? Does magic appeal only to kids? Really? Benefit of hindsight aside, it made me realize that Maurice Sendak was right on how books get (mis)categorized: “I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” JRR Tolkien went a step further and questioned whether even fairy tales are only for children, not adults : “In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: “this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty.” But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: “this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy”...

The Onion has lots of satirical and/or caustic articles on a variety of topics. Like take this recent article on the insanity of society demanding that people be ambitious (socially, professionally, financially, you name it) even if they are perfectly happy as they are. The article in question is about an imaginary guy named Michael Husmer: “an unmotivated washout who’s perfectly comfortable being a nobody for the rest of his life.” So is he living without creature comforts? Nope, he: “is able to afford a comfortable lifestyle without going into debt.” Is he bored then? Actually, he is quite engaged, just not in pursuits that society approves: “he has nothing better to do than “sit around all day” being an involved member of his community and using his ample free time to follow pursuits that give him genuine pleasure.” How can somebody not want to face the pressure and stress that comes with ambition, one of his friends wondered: “he’s still hanging around the s...

I read this adapted extract from Fred Vogelstein’s book, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution , and boy, I am already drooling to read the book. In 2005, Google was already working on its smartphone project. But two years later, when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, Google felt like the “iPhone was a kick in the stomach”. Here’s how one of the architects of Android (Google’s smartphone OS), Chris DeSalvo, described his reaction to the iPhone: “As a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’…What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties.” Google’s plans for the smartphone market were based on three points: 1)       Eventually, technology and bandwidth would allow people to surf on the move, via their phones. 2)      Telecom carriers would have to come around to the phone-as-more-than-something-to-make-calls-with view (feels like such an ancient view today, doesn’t it?). ...

In the Internet Age, some complain about information overload: too many mails, tweets, status updates…while others are happy to be in an era where we have access to every conceivable piece of information and point of view, with little or no censorship. Except that both of the above views might just be myths. Or at least that’s the view of these 2 books I will talk about. The first book, The Information Diet by Clay Johnson, argues that since time immemorial there’s been way more information than any one individual can absorb; and thus the only thing that has changed today is the ease of access to information. Now add to that the fact that nobody is forcing you to consume all that information; and the logical conclusion is that the real problem is voluntary information over-consumption! And isn’t over-consumption an easy problem to solve? As the blogger Shane Parrish said: “It is very difficult, for example, to overconsume vegetables.” But is that the entire reality? Some...

Ed Yang wrote this article about how metaphors shape our thoughts and decisions ; and hence should be used with care. Why we use metaphors is obvious: “Good metaphors can make a complex and obtuse world seem exciting and accessible.” What’s the flip side? Yang points to some study done at Stanford on what kind of measures people advocate as a response to increasing crime. The finding was that the metaphors used to describe crime had a big impact on the responses. Thus people who heard these metaphors: “One common frame portrays crime as a disease , one that plagues cities, infects communities, and spreads in epidemics or waves.” preferred “curative” measures like creating jobs. Whereas those heard a different metaphor: “Another depicts crime as a predator – criminals prey upon their victims , and they need to be hunted or caught .” preferred measures like increased policing and tougher jail sentences. The trouble with metaphors starts when you (mis)apply aspec...

The Internet is changing the language, what Megan Garber describes as “of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language”. Like when it added a new preposition to English: the word, “because” : “Because variety. Because Internet. Because language.” Or take how texting via those chat apps of the smartphone world has converted the “neutral” period (full-stop) into something more aggressive. As Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics, explains : “In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all. In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’” Or take how “LOL” which used to stand for “Laugh(ing) Out Loud” is now increasingly used to denote sarcasm in text. As Lucy Ferriss wrote : ...