I remember that summer vividly; not the year but just the things that happened in it. It was either 2004 or 2005. I had a month and half of sweltering heat followed by my exam results to look forward to and I had a ridiculously slow computer. It also made more noise than our air cooler. I used to wake up every morning, walk out into the living room where my father used to be preparing his daily task list and vehemently beg for some money. I wasn’t oppressed as such but any upgrade for a computer then, was ridiculously pricey. It was also a Mount Everest to justify how my faster shooting skills and increase in the number of counter strike head shots; courtesy new RAM was a worthy financing choice to my father. After several days, he frustratingly relented and bought the RAM and flung it on my bed while warning me not to bother him again unless I wanted to experience the game first hand.
On top the world, my summer turned around and was beautiful; it was warm and sunny outside with kids playing cricket and football, it was cold and calculated, precise teamwork inside working towards the perfect kill. However, I did a new thing then, I opened an Orkut account. This was more or less to keep an eye on what the career minded folks in my college were planning to do and to laugh at a few weirdoes. This was my first social networking account which is what it was called then. Most people said it was the BRIC countries that had taken to Orkut, but I felt as if my life began and ended with it. ‘Scrapping’ each other was über cool and soon enough Facebook ate me up and popped me out with average marks in my final year.
Fast forwarding to date, a lot of things have changed. Nowadays I wake up to find my father’s new Facebook profile picture which is an overtly zoomed-in picture of plain grass. I make some calls, thumbnails are rectified, and his friends can now see his face. He then seems to have accidentally synchronized his calendar with Facebook which isn’t too amusing. He also is super excited about the ‘Easy Mode’ in his new phone which disregards all the primary reasons why one would buy a smart phone and basically turns it into a toy phone used to call automated Sunil Gavaskar or Sachin Tendulkar responses. Social media has us hooked to the extent that we buy phones compatible with them. The first thing we do with these devices is sync up our Facebook and Twitter accounts before we get to our contact list or emails. It defines our lives, our natures, our passions and our emotions.
Without getting into demographics in detail, like all countries, India’s online media participants constitutes of the youth, the working professionals, the retirees, the government and e-commerce portals. All of them have three basic reasons for their online presence. A majority of them are online for networking, there are those who are present for marketing and a considerable size today are connected for content generation. Brands promote and utilize the generated content for analytics and fine tuning of product and service offerings. This continues in a cycle, like a snowball, which keeps getting larger and larger until it runs over something. We don’t know yet what it will run over because we are so caught up in the cycle, we love the cycle and we live the cycle. I saw shoes advertised in my inbox the other day, browsed them, bought them, got them delivered, wore them at the door, love them, paid for them and left the company a glowing feedback for which they thanked me and generously offered a 20% discount coupon for the next binge. Isn’t that incentive enough for me to continue generating content? I recently blogged about my experience with Indigo airlines and immediately received a call from their marketing team apologizing and requesting another chance to help provide a better service experience. So this means that there are people in place to make decisions based on the feedback and the mechanism does work.
However, can all of the user generated content be trusted? Are the companies able to analyse this generated information or do they find themselves avalanched under it? E-tailers have come forth in public and admitted that they are struggling to identify their real target market. Myntra, Jabong and others feed off content, have customized their business processes based on the feedback mechanism but are still struggling to achieve profits. Is it because there is too much data rather than information?
A lot many internationals that I have spoken with have noticed a difference between the use of networking portals across the world and in India. They feel that in their countries, people actually engage in networking unlike in India. The usage of Linkedin is not limited to the time in one’s life where he/she wants to switch to another job. They actually browse Linkedin everyday to read articles, connect with colleagues and peers in similar fields, share information and interests. It is a subjective experience rather than an objective means to end, result based usage in India. Similarly, they say that their Facebook accounts have lesser targeted advertisements than the accounts they have seen of their Indian counterparts. Are the Indian businesses indulging in over-marketing on social media just because they believe it has a wider audience? It is clear that such marketing will lead to a day where people exit the ecosystem after getting annoyed, and without people, marketing, networking would have nothing to coexist with, just tonnes and tonnes of content to scrape through.
Another dimension that we rarely assess is the lack of ethical governance in social media. There exist few defined laws in India to protect users and their content. We have seen an argument between two women on Twitter escalate into a proclaimed suicide. We have also seen a government rally for their candidate reach humoristic proportions. Social media now plays with our emotions. We can now ‘feel stuff’ in our status updates on Facebook. We now have apps that assess our emotional quotients. Our race to connect with others on various levels may possibly lead us to an environment depicted in the movie ‘Her’, where we crave for physical contact and an emotional high.
We therefore, are at a stage where we must stop and assess the value, credibility of information being shared and its necessity on our social portals rather than continue to obliviously enjoy the speed at which it reaches us.
mrtanmay.com 