A Book, A Movie, An Article, A Blogpost and Social Networks.

After heavy recos from Tuna Fish, I watched half of The Social Network. I was reasonably impressed. It was a decent start to glamourizing coding and algorithms. It feels like a good start… maybe twenty years hence, there will be montages that show the completion of someone’s computer science thesis.

Until then, every bit here in Arjun’s rant about Zadie Smith’s review of the movie holds true. I can’t see why coders are still seen as a niche bunch of nerdy-geeky asocial idiots. The number of people in IT and ITES the world over has reached a number sufficient enough to have a reasonable level of diversity… ranging from aiyo paavam Thayir-Saadam guys and girls, to loose, forward, pub-going women, to snooty corporate types to first-gen immigrants to Old Money to…. you get the picture.

I guess it’s just that the people who tell stories in the mainstream media – filmmakers, writers, photographers, journalists – aren’t yet savvy enough that they identify with the large number of IT folks. For them, computers are still a mystery. Most of these folks belong to the generation of my older sister, for whom computers and internet are something that happened after their teenage, when they were well into their postgraduation or first jobs. This is important, because teenage is when you have enough time and enthusiasm to do random things for timepass. This timepass exploration of new things is what gets you comfortable with those things, develop habits and lifestyles around them. Later on, it gets harder to pick up new stuff near-intuitively. So if you didn’t get comfy with the Net by your late teens, it would take that much more effort for you to do so later in life. And where do these artsy types need to use a computer or the Internet…. they don’t appreciate the magic of web search, the awesomeness of the blogosphere or the freedom of the twitterverse. Atleast not enough to think of the level of design and coding that would have gone into them.

For them, we will always be the ‘others’. Our work will always be inscrutable even if it’s just a few lines of PHP. The word ‘hacking’ will always be accompanied by wary stares.

Talking of hacking, I’ve just finished two-thirds of Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. I think websnoops should build a temple to Lisbeth Salander, the mother of us all. I mentioned to Swaroop a while back that it’d be interesting to have a detective in a novel rely on the Net for investigations, and his response was Millennium. Great, but not really what I wanted. Lisbeth uses more than just simple available-for-everyone tools.

What I would like better was if her methods were looked into in more detail. And not just that deus ex machina called ‘Hostile Takeover’ where she’s able to access any harddisk she wants. There’s no challenge there, is there? What I would really like is people using Google, Bing, Yahoo, Pipl, Facebook, Buzz and Twitter to varying extents, using the output of one to augment the input of others. Like you find out from Facebook that Alec Smart went to the high school in College Station, Texas and infer that his parents would have been profs at TAMU coz he doesn’t seem to be ‘from’ Texas given that you found his name on a Left-Liberal website, and then look for ‘Professor Smart TAMU’ to get the dirt on his childhood and family.

Coming to Facebook. Remember how I rued about the artificial walls on Facebook? Watching The Social Network enables me to understand the rationale behind that. Facebook is designed to be like your undergrad experience. It’s all about strong cliques held together by weak links. It’s hard for cliques to change dynamically in such an environment. Unless a major social upheaval happens offline, you can’t expect many, or even any changes to the average network structure online.

In other words, Facebook depends more heavily on the real world to keep its social networks going.

That’s quite unlike Twitter. Following and Unfollowing are easier than Friending and Unfriending. The privacy settings are all-or-nothing, which means either anyone gets to hear what you’re saying or just a handpicked few. For various reasons, most people prefer everyone hears their shout-out, not just the handpicked few. And the structure of sharing and retweeting makes sure that good tweets and good links bubble up the hierarchy, getting their originators more followers, and hence more social capital. And sharing and retweeting also makes it easier to discover new people. There’s little involved in following someone…. there’s no tense sending-friend-request-waiting period. That makes the network more dynamic, and also makes it easier to get to know friends of friends. If you think that fella your classmate keeps retweeting is fun, you follow him. And then you reply to his tweets. And he finds you interesting enough, he follows you back. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. Things stay 1.0 simple on Twitter, unlike the complications on Facebook that are set up to mirror the real world.

Also, given the minute-by-minute, or more realistically, hour-by-hour updates on Twitter, people tend to be more honest. Rather, it’s harder to lie consistently for so long, so it’s harder to be dishonest on Twitter unless you’re really determined…. in which case you’ll use better media to lie than damn Twitter.  If you whine about that meeting you’re in, you’re establishing that you go to work, that you are in a position to attend meetings, and that it is daytime in the timezone you’re in….

Uh, so what?

So… you use the networks in different ways. You find new interesting people on Twitter, establish a sufficient base, and then look them up on Facebook. You’ll try to discover someone’s Twitter account than their Facebook if you are looking to do a cursory check on the person you’ll be hiring… if you want to see if they tend to whine about past employers, or if they have racist tendencies or any other such that might affect your organization’s reputation. And you’ll also want to see the volume of their tweeting during working hours.

And then people will clean their Twitter profiles up, with generous help from Twitter offering differing levels of privacy settings and privacy lists, and then the world will explode.

Or, there’ll be sufficient tripe about everyone out in the open, and we’ll all accept that at our core, we’re all a bunch of twisted, demented bunch of jerks and all of us have tendencies to gripe about our employers and it doesn’t mean we hate our jobs, or all of us have weird tastes in music, and it doesn’t finally reflect on what sort of people we are. And maybe employers will come to accept that their employees tweeting while working isn’t necessarily counterproductive as long as news and youtube links are blocked.

Either way, it’s going to be atleast ten more years before people write decent articles about social media and social networks. I’m not really complaining. There’s atleast some remaining space of exclusivity for those of us who understand these things, and some niche we can all use when we want to get away from those who don’t much understand these things.

Baby, You’re a rich man!

Apparently, art is the best way to reflect life of the times. When most of us have Facebook tab open all day and  keep checking updates every few minutes, imagine what we could give the pool. Hmph! Imagine taping how the code of Facebook got written. I’m not talking about the social life of the geek but the millions of lines of code, one key at a time. Millions of w00ts! pinged on some IRC or tweeted every time something runs bug free or  some equivalent. This and how much Jesse Eisenberg resembles Micheal Cera kept running in my mind all through the two hour ten minutes.

My coding knowledge is limited to occasional Maple here and there, undergrad first year, some geeky friends and Geek and Poke. Agree that every line of code in the movie will knock off half the viewership. But I feel almost enraged that they reflect Mark Zuckerberg as a monkey hitting on the typewriter and bringing out the Hamlet. Number of hits on the site, number of people registering, number of schools/continents it is spreading to, how many big guys are noticing are all good indicators for progress. So is getting people to invest loads of dollars or getting to meet up with goofy guys who date Victoria’s Secret models, even someone sueing you. But the movie somehow misses capturing the core.

There has got to be a way to make a movie on the online experience. There just has to be.

A Brief, Incomplete History of my tryst with Social Networking (On the web)

So Krishashok reminisces about Orkut here. And sends me into flashbacks of the time when online social networking was just making its way into our lives. And of when we folks turned full-on addicts. And when I stepped away from it all.

I’ve been meaning to write about how social networking has evolved and how not all of it has been good, but there’s always been something lacking, something intangible I’ve found hard to articulate. This post sort of opens it all up for me.

Orkut hit NITK by the end of my first year. Bond was the first to succumb. Her accounts of Orkut seemed rather shady at first… it seemed like everything your mother had warned you against. But then, the cornerstone of any social networking site kicked in, and as more and more of my offline social network made its way to Orkut, I succumbed too.

Then we all went through a period of addiction. Posting on innumerable ‘Communities’. Creating innumerable communities on everything lame, deep and everything in between. Discovering new people, new connections. Scrapchats. We had never seen the likes of those before.

Soon we realized it was wayy too cluttered there. All the Toms, Ricks and Harrys we’d added in the initial heady rush were still our ‘Friends’ two years hence. And we couldn’t just ‘delete’ them, that would be rude. And spammers seemed to have taken over every single community. Our ‘Messages’ inbox couldn’t be more spammy. We needed a fresh start.

Facebook.

It was elite. It was cleaner. Not many people were on it, just your crowd.

I would have gotten addicted to Facebook the same way as I’d gotten addicted to Orkut but for one reason. Cisco’s Ironport, so nicely installed by our Sysadmin, Mr. PG Mohanan. A couple of months of no Orkut and no Facebook and I discovered I didn’t need those to go on living. Phew, thank heavens.

And then coming back to Orkut while apping… it was surreal. The communities were all dead, so were the profiles. People judging me by my juvenile three-four-year-old profile and communities made me feel I’d really really changed over the years.

But then, Facebook wasn’t that great either. It was full of weird games and quizzes. And much, much more cluttered than Orkut. I couldn’t quite figure how to fit it into my life. I don’t log on much. And I don’t feel the difference.

To be frank, Orkut was a great ride while it lasted. Yes. This is coming from a girl. And this is even including all the lovsip-frandsip requests anyone who marked their gender as ‘Female’ get.

I’ll tell you why.

It was open. It was free. It was wild. There were no barriers. No holds barred. You could be whatever you wanted. Unapologetically. You could always find your sort of crowd. You could belong while unbelonging. Really. That’s not just a cheesy line.

Everyone’s profile was there for everyone to see. So were their testimonials. It was really great to find out that the guy who partnered me in Physics lab had the same taste in hard rock as I did. While I previously would have thought twice or thrice before asking someone when their birthday was, now it was just public information waiting to be consumed. And OMG, my roommate was deeply influenced by the same books as me. And wow! I’m not the only one who thinks Dan Brown sucks?

Hmph, you might say, you can find out all this info if only you spent more time with these people face to face than being glued to your stupid laptop. But no, the world does not work that way. We all have our inhibitions. I don’t go around telling everyone what my favourite books are, oh hell, I don’t wear a placard advertising my likes and dislikes. I would tell if asked, but then who asks cheesy questions like ‘What sort of music do you listen to?’?

This mutual sharing of data sort of breaks some of the ice. And all the flaming you do on communities actually seems to build a weird sort of camaraderie. You know all the naysaying is not serious, because, hell, it’s online for godsake. And all of you are tied together by, well, belonging to the same ‘community’, some sort of a shared experience. It would be extremely normal in Orkut era to say “Oh yeah, you’re the Troll from that community, right? Glad to meet you, hi”.

And then privacy wasn’t our concern back then. Caveat Emptor held. Those losers who put out their addresses and phone numbers in public deserved every bit of what was coming to them. Orkut made no pretensions about privacy, and we didn’t have any delusional sense of security there.You were being watched, you were being judged, and you knew it. You didn’t put up any pics of yourself doing stupid things as far as you could. You deleted some very telling scraps. It was ‘privacy’ by cleaning up after yourself.

And the communities! People really let their hair down. And it was incredibly public. That made people more articulate, for some reason. Maybe because Orkut was text-heavy. Story-building contests. Long, long flaming threads. You could sink hours just browsing through them all.

Nothing I say can cover the awesomeness of browsing through a zillion profiles, unencumbered by privacy issues. It was some sort of people-watching, no malicious intent, no intrusiveness. The occasional frandsip request did happen, but what the hell. Random scraps from random strangers did happen too, but hey, that was part of the charm.

In short, it wasn’t anything like the real world. All your social norms and rules went out of the window here. And that’s what made it so wonderful. You met people. You got an idea of a world unlike the bubble you inhabited. No matter how swinging your lifestyle, you do tend to have a limited worldview, and a few established social norms and etiquette, that’s what makes your social life manageable.

And obviously we had no idea of what we had until we totally lost it. Along came Facebook, with its new-fangled privacy settings which you could use to cut out anyone who didn’t belong in your bubble. There was no more serendipity, no more randomness. All your social norms came back in, and for some reason that’s supposed to be a good thing. I mean, I found myself wondering if commenting on someone’s wall post would be appropriate since the crowd that had commented before me weren’t ‘my’ crowd. How WTF is that?

The medium is not text-heavy anymore. For some reason, that makes d’bags of perfectly wonderful people. When previously bad grammar would be laughed off Orkut as it was the sign of a frandsip-seeker, it seems to thrive on Facebook. For some reason, ‘Sameeeee!!!!11′ is acceptable.  That, to put it mildly, doesn’t go down well with a spelling Nazi like me.

And the lack of any thought behind all the words thrown there. Sure, there are folks have remarkably wonderful Walls, but they are a minority. Talking of walls, those come up again between people. There’s no ice-breaker, no wonderfully quirky profile that makes you add someone. So, well, Facebook is just like your real world, only more insular because there are no parties. And you find friends using some really useless algorithm, not serendipity.

The whole quirky edgy human aspect seems gone, totally gone, in the sanitized saccharine social networking site that is Facebook.

But then, there seems to be hope.

Twitter.

I like the place quite some. For one thing, you aren’t obliged to ‘follow’ people just because they are your ‘friend’ via some other medium, like, say, real life. It’s text-heavy, which means that you needn’t follow the ones who can’t spell if you don’t like that sort of thing. And Twitter is not yet, atleast in my circles, the sort of place where you simply must follow all your friends. It’s a pure meritocracy. You follow folks based on how interesting you find them. And on whether their pace of tweeting suits your pace of reading – I simply don’t follow folks who tweet copiously, like @mental_floss or @cracked. And again, there’s the headiness of no walls. Sagarika Ghose and Chetan Bhagat are brought down by some random Indian grad student, that’s the wonderfulness of this medium. And finding folks who you think similar to, developing a regular community. And for some reason a Tweetup doesn’t sound as creepy as meeting someone you know from Facebook or Orkut.

You find folks to follow using their social capital or whatever it is that comes of being retweeted by a zillion others. That’s the sort of meritocracy we’re talking about.

People for some reason seem more honest on Twitter. And weirdly that doesn’t seem to come in the way of privacy or anything. Maybe it’s just that there’s too much noise out there to be judging people… if you don’t like someone, you just stop following them, you don’t troll them… you have a better crowd to follow, always.

There’s also a predilection to more positive, happy, funny stuff on Twitter. That makes it a lot more enjoyable than a network where all you have is personal, social updates. There seems to be a bias in favour of humour on Twitter, more than on other sites. That the humour is personal only makes it a lot more dearer to the heart.

To sum up, Twitter>Orkut>Facebook. And I have absolutely no clue about the other sites, though I’ve heard a lot of good things about Friendfeed.

This is all by no means the complete picture. Probably people find Facebookers more articulate, and their Twitter network is full of updates about what everyone had for breakfast, I have no idea. At the end of the day, all social networking is about finding your niche. For that reason there are no rules out here, only patterns to infer from, and even those change all the time. The very nature of people is so diverse that whatever rules you infer, there will be a sizeable number of exceptions, enough to form the crowd on yet another social networking site. No one size fits all here. So if you find Zorpia the best place, I wouldn’t really disagree.

When time did not stand still (but I did)

Expectations really change the way you perceive an experience. And I mean really.

A couple of years out of school, I sort of began losing touch with my schoolmates, me being at NITK, and they all in Bangalore, and their not being on Orkut. And then we had a reunion or two, which I attended expecting everyone to have undergone sea-changes and all. But no, the only shock I got was my diminutive fellow first bencher was now a venerable Petronas tower. No, actually, the bigger shock was that everyone seemed pretty much the same. My close friends were still my close friends. The class tensionParty was still the class tensionParty. The eternal star-crossed couple we giggled about was still the eternal star-crossed couple we giggled about. The class poet still wrote poetry about nature and beauty. And a friend I previously mentioned on this blog as Pink was still wearing the same top she was wearing when I saw her last.

As for those who couldn’t make it to the reunions, I kept meeting them off and on every now and then. They didn’t seem to have changed much, except maybe when they acquired fake accents and awesome degrees.

Even  our teachers treated us the same way when we ran into them once in a while. They still called us by our old nicknames, pulled our legs about the same old jokes (they remembered!)….

Our ragtag bunch of thirty-nine still seemed to be much the same, the eight years notwithstanding. And so it seemed too with my friends from school who were a year or two older or younger than me.

So I basically assumed that everyone I knew from school would be pretty much the same, no changes whatsoever. I obviously was setting myself up for a big shock. And how.

I think Facebook is the biggest time-sink there ever is, even including Reddit or Google Reader. And my saying that certainly is something. So I don’t know what I was thinking one fine day when I decided to look up my schoolmates on Facebook.

The sleek handsome head-boy was now a teetering-towards-middle-age doctor in Boston. The head-girl in that batch, that doe-eyed girl we all aspired to be like, was now a pleasantly plump homemaker in Leeds. Some topper dude was now a professional photographer…. aal izz well, I suppose. Many more of those much-older kids had (obviously) undergone a sea-change.

So, hell, let’s turn to the juniors, shall we? Those kids who used to wet their pants when we were responsible middle-schoolers.

Big mistake. The girls all looked like Heidi Klum, the boys like Justin Timberlake (You know you’re getting on in years when your pop culture references are so yesterday). Their photos oozed so much oomph, it was hard to believe that this was the same kid who used to cry all the time for his mommy, and who would be placated with a pineapple-flavoured lollipop.

So anyway, let’s check out the teachers, shall we? That timeless bunch who stay the same, batch after batch, who narrate the same jokes year after year (and every class will have someone with an older sibling who had told them the joke), including the ones that start with ‘Last year, you know…’.

They were all Farmville-crazy!

One of them wrote a blog which had horrible, horrible grammar. Thank god she was the one who taught chemistry, not the one who taught English. I swear to god I’d have thrown myself off a cliff with disillusionment if she was.

And one more of them, the one who wore those prim sarees which established her as Martinet supreme, who used to regularly upbraid high school girls for our short skirts and too-tight uniforms (she said we looked ugly, it didn’t suit us, and a variety of other things that a thirteen-year-old feels horrible, horrible about), and said segregation of the sexes was good…. she had uploaded a few photos of herself posing in front of various European monuments wearing various forms of tight, revealing clothes. And she looked ugly, it didn’t suit her.

After that, I haven’t logged into Facebook, and don’t feel like for some time to come.

Minestrone Soup for the Confused Soul

I’m wondering if anyone still reads this page. It feels like ages since I updated here, and it shows. I’ve a lot more bottled-up emotions, my smile has never been more fake, and even my teenagy angst has given way to passivity. I’m also a lot less articulate these days, and that shows in the numerous reports and other official bits of writing I’m supposed to delivery weekly thrice.

I’m still finding a way out of the inarticulateness and asocial life I lead at the moment, a relic of an unprecedented amount of work I’ve been assigned,  and things that have happened to me recently possess a strong streak of speculation, something which has no place on this blog, so bear with my obtuse references.

I find I cannot, just cannot, tolerate negative people and pessimism. My entire being seems to dwell and thrive on optimism that all the damned negativity some people exude feels like Kryptonite, weakening me slowly, slowly, until I’m steeped neck-deep in despair and ready to willingly drown myself to put myself out of my misery. Here’s a general word of advice: Don’t say anything if you don’t have anything good to say. Unless of course, it’s juicy gossip.

I’ve taken courses this quarter that exude Awesome with every atom of their being. One of them had mining Facebook data [college networks] as part of a homework. Initially, I too was wide-eyed, just like you reading this are. Sadly, the data is suitably anonymized, and it’s in the form of boring old matrices. And it’s huge as hell… megabytes of numbers alone. Trends are spotted more easily with large samples. Turns out, you can try pretty cool stuff with those megabytes of numbers. Like checking out if college networks share common features, so that if you learn something about one network, you can apply it in other networks you study. Or seeing how to recommend friends to someone who’s just joined.

Among my unpublished drafts is an open letter to Juhi Chawla. No, it’s not about the Phir Mile Sur thing. During one of those hectic weeks, I was shopping for some ready-to-eat food. I was rather sick of the cheese pizzas, so when this carton of ready-to-eat Ashoka Chinese Fried Rice Indian Style with a grinning Juhi on it caught my eye, (and the Buy One Get One Free offer wasn’t too far behind), I grabbed it. After all, Ms. Chawla has lived in the US for a while, right? So she too would have shopped like me at one point or another, and if she was endorsing something, it had to be pretty good, right?Wrong. It sucked. I couldn’t have more than a mouthful. It took dollops and dollops of tomato ketchup to kill the taste of the fried spring onions rice. And heck, this carnage is just spring onions and rice. No beans, no carrots, no chillies, no nothing. I wonder what the heck was Juhi Chawla thinking when she endorsed this inedible pile of dogfood. Someone have her email ID?

And the Phir Mile Sur thing. I share the outrage of many others who’ve written about this. However, I feel it’s just by Zoom, not by the Government of India, so it doesn’t merit the attention it’s getting. I mean, what else do you expect of a channel dedicated to Bollywood and Page 3 types? Ignore it, folks. Not worth raising your BP for.

One of the bloggers I rather like got plagiarized. You can read the whole story here. Seems rather routine, except that her short story got made into a short film this time. Though, I think the approach she took was a tad impractical. Hell, you’re a great writer, granted, but there’s nothing Vasudeva-Srikrishna-Eeshwara-EndaDheivame-OhMyHoly-OMFG about plagiarism. It happens. It’s outrageous, but it happens. And don’t tell me you don’t like the extra attention and publicity that comes with your story being used in some other media. So, instead of crying blue murder, embrace it. Don’t say “You thirdrate plagiarist, you copied. I’ll tell to miss”. Instead, acknowledge that the other person might have made a mistake, and say now that we both agree a mistake has been made, let’s work something out. No one likes to be told by a complete stranger that they are in the wrong, not to mention scores of random netizens cursing them left, right and center.

That said, I found I liked the blog entry better than the Youtube video. There were rather talented folks in the video, granted. But why did they have to be speaking in Ingleesh for godsake? I guess the dialogues were written in English, translated from Tamil in the writer’s head, because the audience of the blog is mainly English-speaking. The filmmaker was so goddamn lazy that he had to retain every damn dialogue the way it was written? It reads well to me because I translate it back to Tamil in my head, just like I do with every RK Narayan novel I read… the words, sentence construction and the entire ambience is TamBrahm, a world I can summon in my head at the snap of a finger. Having to do the same when I’m hearing someone speak is nothing short of painful.

Coming back to food, I found Dairy Milk being sold at an Indian store for $4.99. While that’s laughable by itself, you also need to take into account that you can get larger bars of Hershey’s for one-fifth the cost. And it doesn’t end there…. you get Kurkure (Yes, Juhi Chawla again) for $2.49.

Being bereft of trustworthy outlets for your internal confusions for even a short while, compounds the problem, I find. It’s quite a feat to separate your best-case worst-case analyses from reality after a while. Close friends, I assert, are important as hell.

Apparently ‘Hell’ is an evil, evil swearword in this country. I found that out the hard way, after using it half-a-dozen times in the presence of my BibleBelt-born nephew. And, apparently, so is ‘Damn’. I can’t fathom that at all. After all, I was pretty used to ‘Bleddy Bhaskar/Bleddy Basket‘ probably since I started school, and I hail from the same state as this bleddy basket-case.

In other news, I’m more or less abstaining from Google Reader. When I find time, I hope to be able to automate linking pages in Wikipedia, and possibly use the same logic to automatically mark important words in passages. I’ve also watched tons of useless movies recently, and am stuck on the soundtrack of Duet, looping the songs endlessly. I’m surprised I used to make fun of these songs when they first came out. Who knows, at this rate, I might one day be fondly recollecting the day Phir Mile Sur came out. I’m also confused as hell can be about a lot of things in life at the moment. I’m just hoping things fall in place like they always do.

And two links which put a smile on my face: here and here.