Facetime to Facebook: Social Cohesion Inside the Digital Network

Are we setting ourselves up for loneliness when we seek lasting social bonds within the network of digital media?  Nilofar Ansher

Straight up, let me ask you something elemental: How difficult was it for you to transition from chatting with your friends in a coffee bar to having regular conversations online, to Facebook becoming your dominant form of staying in touch with them? Really, come to think of it, engaging in discussions or chit-chat online should have traumatized most of us, considering we are social creatures and we love to jump all over our conversations (and each other) – interrupting someone’s train of thought, laughing, saying more with our expressions than with so many spoken words.

I guess you didn’t spend a whole lot of time ruminating over the move, it seemed natural, almost inevitable. A broadband connection would have been cheaper for a family, than using your cellphone to talk to each of your friends at a time. Also, the kind of stuff we now share or talk about has changed. Instead of just talking shop, we have this entire ‘media arsenal’ at our disposal, prompting us to share. News, videos, cartoons, books, funny quotes and memes, songs and lyrics, photographs and other digital ephemera that encouraged a move from face to interface. While a decade ago, we still did all these things without the aid of the social media ‘share’ button, the mechanics of digital conversations are different: sharing chunks of information at a time with a larger group or the public (one-to-many dissemination is more the norm on Facebook), the instant feedback loop (acknowledgement from the network) and the interface of the network (textual, word limit, smileys) mean that the very nature of ‘sharing’ has changed.

That loneliness is a pre-dominant concern of social media users is a trope that refuses to die in mainstream media and academic circles. There are frequent surveys of teenagers and youth who spend long hours online, yet fail to have strong social ties within the network (Pew Research, February 2012). There are several news items that chronicle depression and anxiety (and even bullying) among heavy social media users (here, here and here). This is not to say that the frequent spotlight on this phenomenon confirms this peculiar situation of being hyper-connected, yet hyper-lonely. These studies or surveys are certainly not global, nor are they wide-reaching in the demography they cover or the period through which the participants are tracked. On the other side of this debate are the digital culture gurus, the net experts and geeks, and the cyberculture celebs who cry foul when they read such reports. They deny the validity of these studies and insist that social media fosters connections, help us meet people we would otherwise have not met, and intensify our influence in the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend network (here, here and here).

So, are we all gung-ho and cheerful when we build our social network (and net worth) online or are there slight cracks to this happy portrait? Are people who are social ‘in real life’ equally social online and those who are introvert just as shy online or do the positions and personalities do a switch-over the moment we log on to Facebook? Most importantly, are we connecting lesser with each other – in the flesh and face to face than before – but still maintaining strong social, emotional and filial ties with people, both online and offline? I guess a survey wouldn’t be able to answer these questions. I think it’s a bit of everything: firstly, the nature of work we are engaged in; the kind of social activities we love to be part of; the level of engagement we display in any activity, and our immediate environment.

For those of us who spend a minimum of eight hours in front of our PCs and frequently our phones, loneliness is not an active ingredient of our routine. There is work to be done, multiple tabs to navigate content and avatars to talk to. It’s just convenient that we also use the same medium to maintain and strengthen our social network. But over the weekends, when I am not working, if I don’t make it a point to go out and socialize, then of course I am bound to feel lonely. But since we are also habituated to spending so much time online, perpetually interacting with icons, friends, messages, responding to comments, sharing and linking information – constantly on talk mode – there’s a definite sense of something missing when we are not online, available and swimming in the social tide. Is that sense of disconnect loneliness?

Information overload is an entirely different debate, but one that runs parallel to the loneliness issue as well. We consume media content because the benchmark of what is interesting and fun has also evolved. If we don’t talk about the Kolaveri di video going viral or share the ‘Y U No’ memes, we would be left sharing mundane stuff about that guy next door or our low paying jobs or the family wedding where chicken tikka stains ruined your Anarkali. And while we still do that – share the minutiae of our lives with our best friends, most of us don’t do it so overtly online, and certainly not with our network who are always conspicuously online.

Historically, we are adept at maintaining different sets of friends: school, college, library partners, and music class pals, acquaintances that you meet every day on your way to religious lesson; we perform differently with each of them and the quality of information sharing also differs. But with Facebook or other social media platforms, we face a unique situation: to have all these disparate set of friends on a single platform means the rules of social engagement and intimacy change. While it was alright to crack a joke within my group about my brother’s romantic exploits, to do that on Facebook’s Wall or tweet about it to my followers would be kind of funny, in a socially awkward way. That’s just not information for public consumption. Notice that although we are quite aware of what to share with which group, the position of having several of your close friends sharing breathing space with hundreds of your acquaintances is a tricky maze to navigate. It calls for a certain level of artifice. That’s the fine distinction I wanted to draw out between natural rhythm of social communication versus the ones that we engage online.

The spotlight is also on the nature of these interfaces. Once again, net celebs have criticized that plugging in 24×7 doesn’t mean we are missing out on conversations or walks in the park. However, we have to acknowledge that there’s a distinctly sudden change in the way we say something; face to face conversation would entail so many cues to follow – eyes and expressions, gestures and body language, silences, pauses, stuttering, and the breadth of manoeuvres required to convey a detail or argue over something finely, distinctly and with clarity, elements which we still believe necessary for a satisfying conversation. In textual communication, while you hear their responses, there’s the uncertain element of asynchronicity. On Facebook for instance, you say something first, wait for your friends to respond, then you respond to that – it’s a sequence, which is exactly how the conversation would have unfolded in that coffee bar, with the minor difference being that on Facebook, your friends might reply to your post in a minute or perhaps a week later, and you wouldn’t have the joy of witnessing their cheeky smiles.

You might argue that social media has evolved its own lexicon and codes to bridge that physical divide. We now have emoticons and newer ways to re-present the Body. There is also video and voice chat, so it’s like being ‘in front’ your friends, even if you are not ‘with’ them. This is the homily that sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov projected in his novel, The Naked Sun, where communication is done via holographic telepresence called viewing, as opposed to in-person seeing. This perspective of how ‘presence’ is understood is essential to how conversation thrives and ultimately, inter-personal relationships and social cohesion. I have this rather alarmist view that we are already on the trajectory depicted in The Naked Sun, where personal / human contact is shunned and coded out of practice.  

I guess I grew up at a time when we had the best of all the worlds – we were close enough to our closest friends, maintained interesting relationships with our pen friends, visited relatives every other week for that familial bonding, and also had the novelty of the landline to get in touch with friends during the vacation or a favourite cousin who has shifted to another city. Conversely, the limitations also didn’t fill us with the need to know what these people did every hour or day or find out what movies they saw or games they played, or if their relationship is complicated or rainbowish. All of these were, in simple terms, none of our business!

Facebook users thrive in an environment where all personal remarks are subject to increasingly informal responses by default, because of the way the interface is designed. These responses are not taught or borrowed, but mutate over time (and time itself is experienced differently online). Facebook is all about transparency and the ensuing culture of participation that underpins open systems. If you are open about your life, you engage with people more often and gradually post increasingly greater bytes of information. You don’t pause to think if posting about your boredom is of any value to all your friends. It’s understood that the list will itself understand which information is of value and which can be ignored. The wall posting is seen as just that – a post, and not likened to a person in a room or a coffee house saying something to someone. A post or a tweet has value as an item in a list that needs to be check-marked either with a Like or a smiley or a one-liner.

There is no barometer to measure and ascertain whether your presence is ‘valued’ in the ‘corporeal’ sense – you are present as a body on the other side of the screen, but only really represented through your posts. Offline, a look, gesture or nod conveys fully well a response; silence (in this case, deletions) are not the usual responses to a spoken word. How do you measure the impact of a ‘seen’ or Like? In simple terms, I think Facebook does away with the offline value of courtesy or empathy. Critically, it has given rise to a new breed of conversationalist: the lurker. Offline, you do have the odd person in the group who does most of the listening and chips in with a laugh or just nods their head. However, lurking as a defined ‘online’ behaviour, as characterized by consistent lack of engagement, is quite peculiar to the world of Facebook. What does it say about a system’s emotional quotient when half the posts, comments and conversations pinned on The Wall are subject to only being read, scrolled over or worst, manually hidden / deleted as if the words never existed? What sort of a system consciously engineers a space where a person’s output – her words, ideas, opinions – are not subject to a response? What are the implications of subscribing to and evolving towards a culture of constant stimuli with no visible response? That’s the space where loneliness is born.

Facebook cloaks itself as a platform that is alive and teeming with people all engaged and interconnected with one another. What I see, however, is an aggregate service, which culls our data and archives it. Our every little outpouring might be more important to the servers and algorithms than to our own network. I fear the sum total of what I am will just be a footnote in the codices of the Web. That smallness that we experience when we measure ourselves against the vastness of the universe is nothing but loneliness. If we learn to cope with that sense of insecurity on Facebook and others of its kind, then we are set for long term innings within the network. The point is, while the trade-off from face to interface might not be what we anticipated when we invented these devices, perhaps a guide or toolkit or a ‘Wiki’ resource to adapting to a new way of communication is something that should be penciled in for generations of people who are in the transition phase. Crowdsourcing, anyone?

This is the unabridged version of the article that appears in ‘Home Alone’: Digital Natives with a Cause newsletter | Volume 10 Issue 1 | Hyper-connected, yet hyper-lonely? http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dn-newsletter-volume-10-issue-1.pdf via The Centre for Internet & Society, India

Is Social the New Personal?

Is Social The New Personal?

The word ‘media’ has the ignominy of never being called by its first name. It’s always prefixed or suffixed into playing second fiddle. Evidence? Traditional media, mass media, new media, digital media, hypermedia, social media, citizen media – the list could go on with subsets. What remains common and consistent is that consumers have always accessed finished material from the media. Digital platforms have of course changed all that; the lines between content producers and consumers has blurred.

What is it about social media that drives us to contribute information and in turn become producers? Perhaps it has to do with the design interface of easy log-ins, handy read-and-respond menus and archival features that allow us to store streams of conversations. Having a ready reference to the events in a day, week and month allows us to pick and choose – curate in a way – information that we feel is relevant to a larger community beyond home.

So, don’t we have any qualms in putting up personal information on a public platform? Well, social media never took off with claims of being a strictly “public entity”. Its primary purpose was to initiate circles of friendship and network on the Internet, allowing members to share with each other what they would otherwise do via a phone call or text messages. Thus, personal information remained in a tight circle. What we don’t deliberate over is the fact that circles and communities never remain strictly closed or rigid; they contract with the loss of a member, both physically and with waning interests of some, and they expand, with new members becoming family and bringing their own circle of friends on board. It’s the leitmotif of our offline social circles, why not online?

We are at a cut-off point in history when we can clearly demarcate the line between the generation that looked at the coming of the Internet as a historical narrative, an event that occurred in their lives, versus those for whom ‘digitalia’ and ‘logging online’ is a “way of life”. This second group – perhaps those born in the mid-90s, to middle-class, educated, white-collar parents – sprouted their milk tooth as their parents set-up a yahoo account for them (fear of running out of domain names is quite valid). Their first baby steps, first birthday and first comic act in school is recorded not on photopapers stuck in decorated albums, but in the real-time archives of Picassa, Facebook, Orkut or Flickr; a life span coverage that began when their parents uploaded pregnancy pictures to videos of the hospital visit post delivery and so on from their digital cameras to the Web.

We – the digital dinosaurs and analog junkies – might constantly wonder at the ease with which the digital natives adapt to new technology, be it gadgets, apps, new platforms of expression online, a deluge of social media technology and the very language and etiquette required to traverse these disparate spaces. More than a decade ago, we had English professors lamenting the erosion of their cultured language by the worms of netspeak or sms-lingo: “Y r kidz usin short-hand?” they wondered, in full-fledged literary forums across the Western world. Today, it’s not just how we communicate that has changed; there’s a whole sub-culture involved in even accessing the lingo of the digital native. What do widgets mean? Why is an app way more cooler than an application? Since when did Facebook and Google become verbs? Until the 90s, we never used upload and download in the same sentence while talking about movies and music! Of course, this is just another factor to annotate the digital divide debate.

Does this generation realize that they are unwitting curators and historians, documenting their every waking routine and the meta-narratives of their lives?

Many of their activities – uploading photographs, sending emails, responding to posts and commenting on forums, watching videos and shopping online and simply being available in green indicator – are indicators of their personality, their hobbies and interests, their moods and nature, and gives us clues to their literacy levels, intelligence, emotional quotient, and more. Clicking links, reading news at all times, *Liking* several hundred posts (randomly), participating in a-synchronous messages in real-time (you message and don’t wait for the opposite person to respond immediately) and living a multi-tabbed existence is not only what they do but who they are.

- Nilofar Ansher

A version of this blog appeared as editorial for Links In the Chain, an online newsletter brought out by the Digital Natives project of Centre for Internet and Society. Download Volume 8 of the newsletter here.

Textual Talk: Could We Function Beyond Texting?

When I have something to say, I do it best in writing. The flood of thoughts waiting to flow from the tip of my tongue coalesce into military rows of precision on unlined pages. But this was mostly about expression, not about conversations. I predominantly used paper-and-pen to write poetry, short stories, or maintain a diary. I have outgrown those devices to a large extent and adapted to the tap dance of index fingers and thumb on the keyboard. In manual writing, my thoughts had to wait patiently in the recesses of the short-term memory as my fingers slowly measured out and gave shape to words. The white screen has replaced the unlined pages of my diary. Typing, I have discovered, allows me to keep pace with my thoughts.

I suppose the primary way we communicate online is through chatting, which is nothing but textual talk. It’s not restricted to communication that explicitly involves two people “talking”, but encompasses one to many, one to no one in particular, monologues and private messages, offline communication, SMS and email, all via text. A chunk of this textual talk takes place on social media websites, where commenting is encouraged. You must have read the popular joke on social media that goes something like this: Facebook asks me what I am thinking (via status updates), Twitter asks me what I am doing (tweets), and FourSquare asks me where I am (location referencing)….social media is just like my girlfriend!

Offline, writing is just one of the many forms we communicate in; our talk is illustrated and punctuated with gestures and head nods, silences and tears, graphical comical expressions and body movement, laughter and throaty sounds all coming together for a fluid, dynamic and richer form of engagement. How does this equation change online? Beyond texting, we do have video chat services, however, it isn’t the preferred mode of dialogue with many people; slow Internet speed, is one reason and for me, this awkward sense of surreality of speaking to the non-static image of a person, instead of in person. The same reason I hate ear-phones while using a mobile phone. Eccentric? You bet!

Is communication online worse-for-wear because of this interface restriction? A laughter is reduced to LOL or static smiling emoticons. People can sense that we enjoyed their joke if we text a lengthy “hahahhahahaha” and use ellipsis to convey suspense. I use waka waka <these diamond brackets> in Instant Chats to convey “thought speak” and snide remarks. Emphasis comes with the use of asterisk *on either side of the emphasized word* and lots of exclamation marks can convey excitement, wonder or disgust even! We needed a richer and dynamic way to communicate through text, and so we reinvented mathematical symbols and cheekily made room for micro-syntax in our textual talk. There is always room for improvement though, right?

I am still discomfited with this gap between how I feel and what the textual interface allows me to convey. My face remains blank as I text “LOL” on a friend’s status update; statements and one liners aren’t as funny when read, as when you hear them out loud. It’s the same as reading a funny passage in a book. We do cry at the death of a character we have grown attached to; we sigh at a good ending, curling up in bed; and frown at the entry of a villain. But that’s engagement in isolation, with the self.

I log online with the intention of engaging with friends intimately, despite the screen acting as a barrier. We have developed communities, groups and bonds online because there is a richer universe of elements that we interact with in the digital space. It’s easier to “share” those elements with our friends online. But sharing, and adapting to a new way of communicating, does not have to cost me my endearing facial ticks < insert tongue-poking-out emoticon here >. I wish to see a textual experience that stuns us with 3D, augmented reality, holograms, scent dispensers (that allow fragrances to waft through from websites via a usb-dispenser), ambient sounds to add context to a chat (between a person sitting at a lake house and someone in an office), and other interactive elements culled from museum exhibits, 3D films, science-fiction and live talk. Can you imagine the possibilities of chat then?

Perhaps you don’t feel the disconnect while chatting online? May be you think I am one of those digital dinosaurs that lament the bygone era! Shucks. Please share your thoughts via the comments section below. Thank you!

- Nilofar Ansher

Re-Engineering Talk II: Revisiting Online Activism

Quiz time: what’s the quickest way to show you care for a cause (say, domestic violence) without stepping out of your home? Well, just like it. Sorry, that should be ‘Like’, as in, visit Facebook.com, search for the name of the NGO or cause – planting trees and green environment, saving abused kids, literacy for all – click on Like and there you have it, you are one among thousands of Facebook users who support the cause of domestic violence.

Defining digital activism: online petitioning
Digital activism or slacktivism, allows one to participate in causes, read literature or material related to the issue, and voice your opinion (or just lurk on the Facebook group), without the condition of visiting the NGO’s office, meeting up with the troubled people – the abused housewife in the case of domestic violence – plan a series of mobilization efforts, or any of the other traditional ways of drawing attention to a cause and subscribing to it. (Click here for my post on: unconventional ways to protest in the 21st century: Kissing and Walking!)

Subscriptions in the digital age are significantly dominated by the eye-catching buttons – I call it the button culture – which entice you to Sign Up! Join Today, Subscribe Now, Submit, and click on the ubiquitous Like (and that’s why the sobriquet of clicktivism. It doesn’t take analysis of the kind you would engage in if you were to join a cause at the ground level: would I have a free weekend, do I have spare donation money for this charity, would I be in trouble if I participate in a street demonstration, I do not want my parents to catch me supporting an anti-abortion / pro-choice march, it’s dangerous, police could hurt me, or worse, I could get killed. Honestly, the gravity of supporting a cause should not be taken lightly. When you subscribe to a cause – offline – it means devoting time, energy, money, efforts, and sometimes, your blood and life. Do I really want to pay for the freedom of abused children with MY Life?

Why Digital Activism: how does it work?
Are online campaigns restricted to merely Likes and Clicks and Sign-ups and becoming a follower of an NGO with an online presence? Well, many NGOs merely join Facebook and other social networking platforms and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter to reach a wider audience than what their physical campaigning efforts would reach. It’s also easier to promote your event or workshops, conferences and seminars online as news goes viral within seconds. Thousands of youth who don’t read newspapers or pick up brochures and pamphlets at schools, malls or from the hands of a volunteer, would definitely see an online message or marketing campaign centered on a particular cause. It’s the psychology of minimal effort and maximum rewards. Efforts involve subscribing to the cause and keeping up with news or events created by the NGOs, participating in surveys and discussions, and contributing advocacy ideas that will in real time / offline have an impact on the cause. And the rewards are surely manifold, the least is that you will now be seen as a supporter of important societal issues. A cynical viewpoint?

Marketing Gimmick: Follow, Like, Sign-up
Where having an online presence was once seen as an aid to offline mobilization efforts, I see an increasing marketing frenzy accompanying causes online; it’s more about presence than substance. “Please RT this message or Like Us on Facebook” is a common reminder on Twitter accounts, as is, “Help us reach 1,000 Likes by this weekend”! (I see the same method employed by friends when they are promoting the music or art work of their friends on Facebook: please support my friend’s work by Liking his Facebook page.)

This is an artificial method to boost your ratings and presence, visitor hits per day, follower base per month, and crucially, show your boss a great Google Analytics dashboard with stratospheric graph charts. Online causes (causes with only a digital presence) and causes which also have an online presence clutch on to the digital mantra of ROI – return on investment. But it gets rather meaningless after a while as you mistake increasing subscriber base to a good ROI on the number of social media hours you put in you boost your cause – with the real support required offline not accounted for. A majority NGOs also hire social media specialists to connect with audience online. Tell me, if the person didn’t have the time to visit your office, donate money or participate in a short street play or write a letter to the local member of parliament, how does having her email id or Facebook Like help your cause?

Online & Offline | mobilization in real time
How can having 2 million followers and a 160,000 email subscription base promote the cause of domestic violence? Mostly, online causes help raise awareness and could be looked upon as an additional means of letting people know that there is trouble brewing in these areas as well. Awareness campaigns have to be hard-hitting and make your audience sit up and feel empathetic to spreading the message. Beyond that, online discussion boards help bounce off new ideas and help you to recruit potential ‘ground staff’. Beyond that, it would take a kindred soul to be interested in the activities of an NGO, enough to go beyond Liking and Following and attend fortnightly meetings, shoot off letters to government departments, write letters to newspapers, spend time with the constituents (the people who face abuse) and make your time and resources available – without pay, as a volunteer.

The real success of any campaign – whether political, marketing or a social cause – is how well you mobilize support in real time for the afflicted and affected groups. Has their plight lessened? Are they able to talk about their problems on the platform you operate on – World Wide Web? Do they have access to digital technology? Do you look at them as “charity” cases who need help but cannot contribute to the success of their own well-being? Please don’t! If you were the victim of such abuse, what kind of support or help would you expect from an NGO and its supporters? Stop patting yourself on the back because you have 1,000 new Likes since last weekend! Pass the baton of change to the victims. They have a lot to say about mobilizing support. Let me end with this wonderful quote: Activism proceeds best when it is persistent, positive, respectful; filled with facts & hope ~ Billie Jean King. (via @SheSpeaksNow on Twitter)

- Nilofar Ansher

Re-engineering Talk: Artificial Communications on Facebook

Most of us are on Facebook (600 million IS most) and use it as one of the primary means of communication. The Wall on Facebook is pretty much a dual-purpose entity. It serves as a linear narrative of all its members’ activities, sort of like a three dimensional pin-up board where messages, conversations and external links are posted and commented upon; these comments and conversations transform The Wall into a ‘real-time’ interactive space.

As Facebook evolves, and with it its league of users, we have come to see the changing dynamics of conversations online. One-on-one conversations are slowly overtaken by a lot of posts: videos, comics, audio and music clips, images and personal photographs, and predominantly, news links which are topical. Secondly, commenting has received a huge fillip via Facebook. The presence of the ‘comment’ button is an ‘incentive’ to use it, to speak your mind, make your presence felt and contribute to the Facebook universe of one-liners or mini-thesis.

Facebook is all about transparency and the ensuing culture of participation that underpins open systems. If you are open about your life, you engage with people more often and gradually post increasingly greater bytes of information as well as the minutiae of your life. You feel the minutiae carry relevance or ‘value’ on the message board as seen by the anticipation and eagerness with which we reserve for responses, comments and the ubiquitous ‘Like(s)’. Could there also be an ‘obligatory’ response stimuli engineered in the whole process? A best friend posts a link and we feel ‘obligated’ to acknowledge its presence.

Critically, it has given rise to a new breed of conversationalist: the lurker (to borrow from Prabhas Pokharel – The Right to Lurk post). Offline, you do have the odd person in the group who does most of the listening and chips in with a laugh or just nods her head during conversations. However, lurking as a defined ‘online’ behaviour, as characterized by consistent lack of engagement, is quite peculiar to the world of Facebook-like platforms. With multitudes of posts and links, lurkers engage with virtual material through the process of ‘observances’ aka non-engaging participation.

If obligation is the obverse, then the reverse asks equally relevant questions. What does it say about a system’s values when half the posts, comments and conversations pinned on the online board – The Wall – are subject to only being read, scrolled over or worst, manually hidden / deleted as if the words never existed? What sort of a system consciously engineers a space where a person’s output – her words, ideas, opinions – are not subject to a response. What are the implications of subscribing to and evolving towards a culture of inconsistent response to stimuli?

There is no barometer to measure and ascertain whether your presence is ‘valued’ in the ‘corporeal’ sense – you are present as a body on the other side of the screen, but only really represented through your posts, links and status updates. Offline, a look, gesture or nod conveys fully well a ‘response’. Similarly, when you post a status update, you essentially are ‘talking’ to an audience, the Facebook universe comprising your ’2889 friends’. Silence or deletions are not the usual responses to a ‘spoken’ word. How do you measure the impact of a ‘read’ or ‘Like’? In simple terms, I think Facebook does away with the offline value of ‘courtesy’.

Facebook users thrive in an environment where all personal remarks are subjected to increasing *non-formal* responses, either one-on-one or one-to-many communication. These non-formal responses are new, novel, disparate from the communications we engage in offline and thrive on their own codices of conducts. In effect, these responses are not taught or borrowed, but mutate over every epoch of usage – which could be a week of activity or a month on Facebook.

Facebook cloaks itself as a platform that is alive and teeming with people all engaged and interconnected with one another. What I see, however, is an aggregate service, which culls minutiae of all its users and archives it. I fear the sum total of all my contributions will just be a footnote in the vast archives of The Wall. I am wary of a future where my body of work ends up representing a lot of news, links, posts and Likes, with no recall value associated with most of the inputs; how many of us recall even 1/3rd of our activity or chatter on Facebook? Real conversations do, and should hold non-computational value, in our memories and in our evocations of them. Never mind, if I don’t know how many ‘Likes’ or ‘Comments’ those memories never receive.

- Nilofar Ansher

This post has been featured in the print and online edition of PC Tech Magazine’s May 2011 issue: download the copy here: http://www.pctechmagazine.com/news-a-blogs/news/411-pc-tech-releases-issue-4-may-2011

Hunger Strikes Are Passe: Try Kiss-Ins and Walks!

Tis a season of protests and revolutions, methinks! Just look at the number of regimes that are toppling over in Middle East and Africa, and the number of citizens out on the streets raising their voices against corruption, oppression, human rights, and the right to a secure and free state.

While ‘digital activism’ is now being heralded as the new weapon of choice for citizen revolutionaries – refer to Facebook groups and Twitter mobilizations, there are others who chose the age old route to get the government’s attention – Hunger Strikes, Sit-Ins and Sloganeering / Bannering on streets.

Liplock your way to protest against gay discrimination: a couple participate in the kiss-in protest organised outside the John Snow pub in SoHo, London

However, what caught my attention recently are two really ingenious ways to protest against injustice: the Kiss-in Protest in London’s SoHo, where hundreds of straight and homosexual couples descended on the London pub John Snow for a mass smooch event after a gay couple were ‘thrown out for snogging’ (Read more via Daily Mail, UK) and the ‘Walk to Work’ protest engineered by Uganda’s opposition party key figure Kizza Besigye (read more below).

Below are five, random popped-my-eyes-open protests staged in the last couple of years.

‘Ukraine is not a Brothel’ Protest: Experts say that there are 12,000 prostitutes in Ukraine, many of whom are students trying to make ends meet in difficult times. One group has found creative — and sometimes abrasive — ways to let foreign tourists know that “Ukraine is no whorehouse.” – via http://www.spiegel.de

Ukraine is infamous for its 'sex industry'. Femen organises protests across Kiev to draw attention the increasing number of college girls who turn to prostitution to make ends meet

‘Walk to Work’ Protest: The Ugandan opposition last week started the peaceful Walk to Work campaign to protest against sharp increases in the prices of food, fuel and commodities, with inflation now into the double digits. Via: TheEastAfrican.

The Walk to Work Campaign initiated by Uganda's opposition party key figure Kizza Besigye is reminiscent of Gandhi's Dandi March against the British for imposing Salt Tax

Pink Chaddi Campaign, India: Journalist Nisha Susan set up The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women on Facebook and urged women to send pink panties to Pramod Mutalik, the head of the ultra-conservative Hindu group Shri Ram Sena, in order to shame him into backing down from his threats to disrupt Valentine’s Day celebrations.

Wonder what he did with all those pink panties?

Toss the Shoe: Muntadhar al-Zaidi will go down in Arab folklore as the man who dared to throw his shoes at George Bush in December 2008. It set the precedent for similar shoe throwing incidents across the world, including the one against Home Minister P. Chidambaram in India.

Journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi Throws the Shoe at Target

PETA’s Caged Nude:

Twenty-five-year-old Erin Armstrong crouched in a small wire cage on Hollywood Boulevard to protest against the use of hooked poles and wires to engage performing animals in the circus of Barnum and Bailey.

There are scores of unique protests employed by citizens today, partly because it grabs media attention when sensation or novelty is involved. I guess, injustice can be tackled not only via serious political sloganeering and street marches, but also through funny, intelligent and contextual campaigns that involve non-participants to take an interest in the act and the cause. Do you have an unusual protest idea to support a particular cause, then write to me!

by Nilofar Ansher

Retelling Our Stories: How the Screen Rescues us from Obscurity

How do most of us tell stories about our lives? Preserve a piece of our history for posterity? Many a times it’s through retellings. A favourite dress worn on numerous occasions, a food joint we visit, a scent we prefer – books we read, music we listen to, friends we make and groups we associate with, jobs we choose – all these choices in life tell a story about who we are and what we stand for.

However, most of these choices or ‘tellings’ aren’t consciously essayed. More often than not, they are non-verbal, non-structured cues that we carry with ourselves, without any obvious intent or desire to showcase what our stories are about.

Perhaps in the decades past, this would have been especially true. Choice was limited, whether through the offices of gender, access, technology, education, career preference, or tradition. Stories would then have been muted or retold only by those in power or in a position of influence.

Of course, the stories which go untold or are muted in the timeline of history are to be considered pieces of a larger narrative; a narrative which looks incomplete, but goes on to unravel entire plots, character traits and semantics of poesies with its missing pieces.

What does the screenager do to tell a tale? On the virtual canvas, stories are told, retold, deleted, and hyper-texted in endless posts of continuums. We indicate preferences through clicks. We indicate stronger preferences through shared links. And we indicate our Likes and Loves through posts and pokes. We are given the power to wipe off some stories and update our autobiographies every minute.

There is no shame in showcasing the minutiae of your life, after all, the screen is the only scribe that will hold your record for all ages.

Imagine what would happen if tomorrow, you no longer had the stage to sing your song and tell a tall tale or two? Who will remember you once your online ‘links’ are cut off? Imagine if your clicks and posts were restricted and you were denied access, or couldn’t share your story with your fellow cyber-storytellers. What stories would you save from your favourite pages? What are the pieces of the online puzzle you would hoard as a remnant of what you stand for (stood for) and represent(ed)?

These bundles of retellings are so slippery. While the silk and wool from my growing up years get moth eaten, I hope after I am no longer physically here to tell my tale, the screen stays loyal and keeps my stories intact on the spidery web.

- Nilofar Ansher

Why the Social Network is Feared? And Why We must Rejoice in that!

“Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend…” The Hundred Flowers Campaign, The Communist Part of the China, 1956-57

Digitized Social Networks: Tip of the Pyramid. Image courtesy vaXzine / flickr

Mark Zuckerburg has got us all figured, hasn’t he? He understood market trends no doubt and piggy-backed on other similar networking spaces online to come up with Facebook. It is not surprising that so many of us subscribe and function exclusively through social networks. What is surprising is that critics of social media tools castigate the medium for its apparent ill-effects on youth and children.

I get the sense that the ‘disconnected’ youth are looked upon as innocent goats being lead to the slaughterhouse of disconnection and hyperactivity. In the grand scheme of naming and labelling, we are now info-junkies, who take recourse to clicktivism and the comfort of the cyber-hive to sidestep ‘real issues, real interactions, real life’. We have no control over what sites we sign up for, how much time we spend there, the amount of distraction we give in to and the total inability to monitor, limit and sign off from social media.

Clichés can be such a force to contend with. They aren’t easily discarded and have the tendency to regurgitate through every generation, often with irony. Remember how radio, then TV, then music and fashion and all things younger, modern and Western were thought of as corrupters of the youth?

I think the traditionalists don’t dislike social networks, so much as fear it. Social networks online have become the barometers of our times. Our collective likes, links and loves are voted, discussed, tested, withdrawn, updated and shoved on the notice boards of our extended cyber-groupies. Status updates are slicker than breaking news. There is order in the group and there is cohesion in the network. The network has become a force to contend with.

And I am not just referring to the recent country-wide revolutions overtaking the globe, credited largely to the blitzkrieg of social media users. That is just the peel off the scab. Businesses and financial transactions, social and private occasions, events, political machinations, cultural renaissance, technological innovations in the classroom and health sector – social media fosters that kind of behaviour and inventiveness online.

In a way, we have hewn ourselves a new social order where statehood and governance don’t form the tip of the pyramid (with law and order forming the second rung, economic institutions and businesses forming the third layer and religious and cultural affiliations forming the penultimate block, in the traditional world order). The new social order points to the power of inter-personal networks formed via social media, itself born from the need to communicate, connect and consume the fruits of the online world. (bytes for thought?)

Who are the leaders of this network? Despite what the widely cited definition of who a digital native is and might be, the reality is that no particular age group or denomination or race is the forerunner to this club. Most of us have felt empowered, liberated, influential, and at the cusp of change and an extraordinarily life-changing revolution when wielding social media. And why wouldn’t any self-respecting power-monger in the real world fear that kind of power moving away from his sphere?

I find a happy thought in thinking of the digital native as reforming national alliances, shaping political futures of the global world, transforming the way ideas, interactions and innovations are informed and iterated. The critics of the cyber-social-network have plenty to lose with the rise of the digital native. I say, let a 100 ideas bloom and a 100 social networks engender for every digital native logging in!

- Nilofar Ansher

Signifiers of Power and Authority in Cyberspace

What this symbol stands for: loss of control and choice

Not specifically about power, but this is one of the first symbols of ‘control’ and ‘access’ online. We are so used to seeing this sign across web spaces and our computer programs that we don’t think about how intrinsically we associate it, rather, disassociate it with loss of control and access. Because that’s what this symbol stands for: loss of control and access.

I am beginning to see that we need to rethink or reframe the context and ‘seeing’ of power, authority, control and influence in the online context. Perhaps the signifiers of power in cyberspace won’t necessarily be equivalent to that used offline. However, symbols have an unspoken ‘clout’ and it’s implicit that users will understand the ‘culture of compliance’ associated with its use.

There are government domain names and logos that have crossed the barrier from the real to the digital space eons ago and wield authority online, if not power. There is respect associated with government, legal, state and city-level departments’ domains, portals and websites that disseminate factoids. Even official tourism, cultural and educational websites are accorded respect and draw followers.

The logos of applications and programmes in the online world dominate the imagination of offline subscribers too – subscribers of an idea, ideology or meaning. These logos are signifiers of influence and a certain culture. The Torrent file has created a culture of subversion, granting unwritten licenses to users to accelerate piracy and illegal content storage. Today, the four-coloured Windows logo is a prompt entry into a suite of software and tools that a whole many generations of us have come to associate with writing, reading, editing, presentations and surfing – it’s what Cadburys is to chocolates and Xerox is to photocopying. Need I mention YouTube, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and other companies in the real world who have created applications for the Web and come to represent dominant ways of doing things online in different categories?

Cyber security and censorship are two important issues that many netizens are debating about. While the tick mark of ‘Verisign’ and ‘Verisecure’ have become hallmarks of trust and safety, the “I Agree” box that we all invariably click and accept are blatant invitations to their alma maters allowing access to our private communications: conversations, chats, photos, messages, links, uploads and pings.

There are those unseen behind-the-scenes machinations that deny us access and limit our understanding of the backdoor and how some things run online. The symbol for passwords – keys, asterisk and circular bullets – and our slow evolution to accepting the ‘browser organiser’ to save, remember and recall our passwords for future log-ins also signifies sharing of control denominators. “…sometimes blankness is the symbol in the online world that is restricting access. The way of control is the lack of a “attach photo” link rather than a visible/present symbol” (Prabhas Pokharel).

Logos online have sought inspiration from their offline signifiers too: the Home symbol on our broswers and the checkout cart image on shopping sites are two such examples

Secondly, have some symbols from the offline world gained more currency in webspace or vice-versa, symbols created online have gone on to become legitimate ones in real world? The shopping cart of the supermarket is now the ‘checkout’ and ‘add to the cart’ symbol online, and our concrete houses are still keeping us ‘Home’ even in cyberspace.

This blog post is a lateral process in identifying the processes of meaning making in the World Wide Web and if there are any comparison parameters to how we imbue symbols with meaning in the real world. I am sure I have left out a host of symbols, images and logos in use online and offline.

- Nilofar Ansher

Internet Safety: How Safe Do I feel Online?

There are days when you sit on the windowsill of your balcony and kill time gazing at the blue blue skies, your eyes squeezing shut at sudden flashes of sunlight. Hazy drowsiness follows and then you are asleep, safe in your la la land of dreams, memories and imaginary creatures.

The windowsill is not really a safe corner to be perched on; you could fall off at any moment. However, your dream state saves you from thinking about the fall. In your dream, there are no logical boundaries of reason and laws. Rationality takes a backseat to our first instinct – that of exploration.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time…” T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

The way I see the Internet – a place of exploration – does leave some space for fears or apprehensions. It’s partly a romanticized Safari trip, with the World Wide Web as a crude compass. Fistfuls of information about my life are uploaded online. Names of family, number of friends, a tracing of my work life, places I have lived and loved in, daily chit chats and religiously updated tweets that flow at the speed of our neural networks. Ask me what is NOT online!

The other part I navigate with caution. I remember the first time I chanced upon an ‘adult’ site. ‘Enter only if you are 18’ it boldly stated. But at 14 I was only too eager to ignore the conditional grammar. When I started playing around with the Net, I wasn’t aware that crimes could be committed online. It’s not as if the guys policing the song downloading websites would come home and hack me to pieces right. I was physically safe in my computer station at home because I was clueless about the interconnectivity of the service provider and larger servers and terms such as IP address.

And come on, how could my safety be jeopardized when I was only tinkering with AltaVista search engine and Yahoo Chat Rooms! We were warned by family members familiar with the Net to never give out real information while chatting – so I became Suzy Q in the WhitesOnly chat room. That’s all. Precaution taken. Random folks wanting to befriend me on various social media sites that I am a member of are a strict no-no. So are spam mails, money wanted mails, forwarded mails. When it comes to shopping, I trust my brother or husband to do the deed for me (gender and technology, I know!). I have qualms about giving up my credit card number and password online.

I still think twice before uploading pictures online – why would my 150 Facebook friends want to see pictures of me attending my cousin and my brother in law’s wedding? Ridiculous? Or maybe, I am a decade too late. Would it be fun to share photos of the Taiwan workshop? Yes! Because it has relevance to a group of people who have participated in the event. Would I share financial information online? No! Would I put up my final will online? No! Would I put up my medical records online? No sane person would carry such documents while on a Safari trip right? I guess it’s the way you define the term ‘exploration’ in the online world.

Today, it has come to mean pursuing work options, making friends, networking for social inclusiveness, collaborating with virtual strangers on projects, pursuing leisure activities, shopping, and sometimes idle, mindless surfing. In all these activities, there is scope to be duped, cheated, ostracised, badgered and even lawfully prosecuted. The need to temper the contours of your digital life arises because the digital world has come to mimic the real world when it comes to crime, corruption and fraud. However, we do not have laws yet that take off from the offline world. Sex offenders online don’t get punished habitually as they might in the real world. Rare in the real world, rarer still in digitalia.

Where does that leave those clueless first timers or arrogant often timers or those naive enough like me who believe that no REAL harm can come off the Net? It’s random luck that I have escaped phishing, online fraud, forgery or worse, at least for me – been morphed into a compromising photograph or video online! They say once you put up information about yourself out there, it’s virtually impossible to completely wipe it clean from cyberspace. Why am I still not scared?

- Nilofar Ansher