Dictators and Social Networks

Not even in their dreams the dictators in the middle eastern countries would have expected these kind of uprising from the youth of their countries. The countries are ablaze , the squares of country Capital's are abuzz with angry people and the state of anarchy which dictators have carefully preserved over the decades are crumbling in front of their own eyes.

The winds of change , which almost became a bit of gaffe thanks to obama's alleged overuse, are sweeping fast and so fast that mountains of resolute are uprooted.

So what caused these uprising and why Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain are all burning?

There are multiple reasons to this:

The first being the order of the world is changing. The Western democracies which traditionally fed these dictators in the name of arresting the arise of islamic fundementalism are mired with their own economic issues.

Secondly these countries have huge youth population who are not included in the weatlh enjoyed the top honchos of their country and needless to say they are very angry about that.

Lastly, the advancement of technology ,especially the social networking, has made the collaboration between the angry youth incredibly easy. All that it takes is to create a group in Facebook to share your frustration , organize your even and zooom there is a social uprising in notime. 

The dictators who have been very comfortable arresting the earlier uprisings with a combination of strict policing, tightly controlled media and brutal forces are caught unaware now. The key definition of what they are trying to control has changed significantly thanks to the non traditional media. The resistance and uprising of the angry youth, which has been crushed successfully so far, has non traditional letouts like facebook, twitter, youtube, flickr etc.

When there are easy letouts for your emotions, you start expressing more freely. When you start expressing more freely and more often, you tend to ignite the fire.

It would be an exaggeration to state that the soc networking site are the orign of these unrest, but we cannot disagree on their level of contribution in igniting, fueling and sustaining the momentum. The well preserved forests of arrogance, callosal absurdities and oppression have been set ablaze by the tech savvy angry youth.The interesting thing is that the forest is quite big and the areas of China, North Korea, Iran etc are still withstanding.....

We are very sorry Mr Dictator: all that it takes to initiate an uprising against you are a bunch of tech savvy youth with facebook, twitter etc accounts. Get your acts right or you would very soon have people rewriting your legacy [they would capture that in wikipedia as well].

Btw, lets all thank Mark Zuckerberg and others for contributing so much for a big cause , though their original intent was just do make some ad-money!!!!

#iranelection , twitterati and emergence of new media

Sunday 14th of June 2009 has been an interesting day for iran, media and twitter and in no particular order.
During sorting out things for the next week, i happened to catch the trend #cnnfail from my twitterfon and found people are very upset that CNN hasnt done much coverage on the emerging Iran trends, this was taken up seriously by CNN and looks like the Iran story is given prominence there. Traditionally the Newspaper and TV media are used to give people what they thought is relevant and which would captivate the attention of mass and advertisers. Looks like this law is being rewritten now. The public could express contempt of the way media behaves and the media has to listen to the public
And the term journalist which used to be static earlier has become more dynamic as the common public could easily express in real-time open media like twitter and post their photos and videos to popular social media sites like youtube and flickr. The common man who happens to be there on the spot who may not have journalistic acumen is ready to pass on the information the analysis which was typically done by the journalist has now been given to the common public.
Though this brings in chaos (most of the tweets are emotional and rumour based) , the relevance in time (i tweeted to couple of blokes in iran to get some opinion) and the flexibility that it offers is next to none.
Probably the traditional media moguls should take a note and be prepared to face the reality.
In the meantime, things are extremely chaotic in iran as per the input streams from twitter (good that twitocalypse was yesterday) and twitter once again is in mainstream headlines by serving as a gateway for various links to opinions, videos and pictures across the web.
I think for most of us it feels like suddenly stepping into the sunlight after having spent years in a dark dungeon cell, facing a flood of informations. But i think we would get used to this and refine our life styles.
Hope iran gets some peace tomorrow, will check my twitter first before checking the static media.

Psychology of social networking sites

Nobody passes a day these days without checking out or without getting an invitation to join a social networking sites, they are the in thing and if you are not a part of these vogue stuff, you will be branded out of touch with the system, and with those net junkies , the peer pressure adds up even more.

If you start digging deep into to the psyche of the social networking site, we can understand our human carving to be associated with a group. This didn't start recently and has been since from our primordial days, man (and women too) started moving in groups for the want to food and safety which eventually led to the birth of villages , cities, countries etc and etc. Being in a group (except if you are a true lion which by probability very low) just adds to your comfort and you feel more courageous if you are among the crowd of like minded people. (Refer single theory , group theory etc or those pranks in your college days).

The key tenet of Internet has been collaborations among a diversified groups and initial days of web was all about consolidating information, it was a good foundation which led to newer interactions with somebody/thing whom you wouldnt have dreamt of meeting . For a society whose constituents had a shrunken vision of life, thanks to the widely accepted materialistic values, this was hardly sufficient and thus started chat .Chat was(is) a transient interaction and it built good (and some bad too) relationships. Evolutionary theory started playing a role and gradually web started moving towards social networking.

I dont have a clue about the exact birth of social networking sites (wikipedia is a different genre ) and am sure our wikipedians would take care of that, there are numerous popular soc networking sites like myspace, facebook, linkedin, orkut, bebo. flickr etc with huge fan following and very niche sites like asmallworld which are by invitation only but all of these exploit our carving for being in a group (not forgetting those emerging virtual world ones). So there is something to choose from whatever may be your want. But the sad fact is apart from being popular and money spinning machines, these sites are becoming more like Walmarts , Carrefours and Tesco's of the world. Pure commodity stuff.

On the otherhand there are set of emerging sites like twitter , librarything, passportstamp really stand out of the crowd for different reasons, twitter is a microblogging site and is a real cool stuff. Librarything is one the most useful site which exists for a purpose , where you can set up a catalog of your books (200 for free membership) in no time with all the information and you can put it in your blog also for a random display of your books, passportstamp is a site where you can keep a track of your travels and am sure if we dig more we could get more.

Whatever said and done, its good to understand that technology helps in getting people closer together where religions (were they supposed to ?) and other great leaders have failed. It would be interesting be see what would be next evolution of these sites, may be we all will dwell in the virtual communities and would be debating with socrates , aristotle in a greek amphitheater sipping our super chilled fosters. Lets keep our eyes open, in the mean time lets socialize more in the real world with real people, there has been no substitute to it.