twitter – My Bit for Change

Cyber world has become a perpetual world where we all live in and yet we don’t. This is the next big frontier which the western masters have innovated and trying to conquer. Cyber space might be the perfect place for mind warfare. Victory here means conquest of whole mind kind. This idea must sound absurd and ridiculous. I agree this is as much an alien thought as I can imagine in my wildest imagination. I am neither a technologist nor a tech freak. Coming from finance and accounting background, let me ask a few questions which mark arrows towards the point I have raised.

Let us first try to unwrap this argument. How secure is our information on services like Gmail, Hotmail or on Yahoo mail? How secure are our videos and pictures on Facebook or Orkut? What do they do with my tweets? I used to believe that since I have control of my privacy settings, so it’s all very safe, people only get to know what I am willing to tell.

Friends just have a second thought about it. Your mails, information, pictures & documents may be safe from those who you don’t want to share with, but are they really safe? They are always available, just a click away, those guys who are storing it for me, am I sure that they aren’t using it? Am I sure that they are not sniffing through my information? They claim that they don’t use it but they also say that we might use it anonymously to help improve our ‘product’. This should be enough to ring alarm bells.

If still not, then let me give you view from another side. To run any business successfully, you need to have inputs, then you do some value add to these inputs to convert them into a sell-able product. This conversion costs you money. Once the product is ready, you need to find buyers to whom you can sell the product. And as a thumb rule, the price at which you are selling the product has to be higher than the cost you are incurring to produce it. Your selling price minus your cost is your profit. All commercial organizations exist only to make profits. And mind you all these organization are highly profitable.

For these services which I mentioned, let’s try to find the input, the value add and then the sell-able product. For convenience let me take the example of twitter. To support millions & millions of users, they need to have big server farms, which cost tens of millions of dollars, to run these farms they need to pay bills and salaries to staff. To develop & maintain the service that they are offering, again they need to run offices, pay bills and salaries to staff. Their end product is an application which people are able to use, express their thoughts and viewpoints. Bingo it’s all free. We don’t pay a single penny to twitter.

Isn’t that enough to raise some suspicion? If not then let me give you another hint. You must have seen suggestions while using twitter, which suggests you, people whom you might be interested to follow or people who are similar to ones you are following. Another value add and that too free of cost.

Ever thought how a service provider which is offering free services to all across the globe is able to make millions of dollars in profits?

This should be enough to mark arrows that someone is doing user profiling at a mega level. Our click on suggested people only confirms the profiling they have done.

Now the question is with all this profiling who is the buyer of this information or product. I will leave this question open to readers for them to think and make their own analysis.

Last but not the least, what I worry most is that my generation was born in an era when TV was a novelty. We got easily influenced by what we saw on it. Comparing us to people of Radio generation & generation even before that, we very easily bought new idea & thought appearing on TV. With these free services which intrude into the privacy of individuals, doing their profiling, what will happen to our new generation? The Cyber warfare is on and we are all part of it. I shall also leave this question open for everyone to think.

Do we follow any common rules whenever we debate over social media? The stories of bashing and abusive languages are very common when anyone tries to share personal opinion, in favour of or against any issue. Those who portray themselves as tolerant and liberal also lose their patience when they run out of arguments. The debates become heated discussions and usually no conclusions are derived in the end and no opinions are changed.

Debates on social media remind me of my college days when I actively participated in study circles and group discussions. Those forums were used to share our thoughts on a pre-decided social or religious topics and everyone would have to come prepared with their research and opinions. The rules were strictly defined, i.e.; no personal attacks and no point scoring techniques. It wasn’t about winning or losing an argument, rather the whole idea was to develop a better understanding on issues. ‘Sacrifice of opinion’ was categorically taught and was instrumental in reaching consensus over the issues. The moderator used to have a very crucial role to play to keep the things calm.

Social media has given everyone an opportunity to express their opinions. Whenever you say something, you have to listen to the other side too, in order to keep a balance. It’s an utter failure if we are not ready to listen. Our society is going towards two different extremes and one easily gets tagged with one or other extreme even if you have nothing to do with either of them. You are put into camps and tagged with the payrolls without any logic. The point that you are in ‘opponent’ camp if you aren’t uttering my words, is taking us nowhere. Many a times, emphasis is given to pressurize others to speak the words which they don’t necessarily believe in, and this surely comes under fascism. Also we have different rules for ourselves and for others. One thing might be commendable if our hero is doing it and something similar might be a nuisance and condemnable, if it comes from the opponent camp.

We have a serious problem with ‘active reading’ as well. In our schools, we are taught the skills of ‘active listening’, but very little focus is done on active reading. Probably that is the reason that on social media we only seldom read what the other person is writing. Usually the twists and turns of the words and out of context statements and misquoting are done for point scoring, negating any logic and negative propaganda based on lies. The haste of commenting and replying just adds to the problem and very soon the debates turn into an online fight.

A much deep-rooted problem is the confusion of ideology. Uttering two opposite things in one sigh is such a common phenomenon that it amuses me. A lot of times, people don’t understand what they are talking about. Information from internet is randomly copied and pasted without even understanding the basic idea. Also, new questions are put forward in reply of previous questions while the originals remain unanswered. Sometimes the answers aren’t read or understood and a new question is raised. More and more confusion is raised for no reason which is resulting in division in the society.

Blogging world also witnesses many blogs just conveying one side of the story and promoting hate speech. Criticism for the sake of criticism is in fashion on one hand and lack of tolerance reigns. Harsh comments and retaliatory responses reduce the influence of actual message.

A lot of people also have their own connotations of the words. Some even find the word ‘female students’ as abusive to women and if argued, they just retaliate without any logic. The approach of ‘holier than thou’ and concepts of ‘learned than thou’ are embedded in the mind-sets of many.

Most of the bashing is done in the name of religion (for/against) and politics. Even if you tell something specific about someone which is positive today, immediately a rebuttal will come for something negative done decades ago by them. Can we appreciate something positive without ifs n buts? A difficult question, I guess.

Due to these reasons, more humble and literate people avoid online social media debates. And the result is that sensible voices are reducing in the social media world. If the trend continues, I am afraid social media will be left to abusers only. The life on social media is not in isolation. It definitely has an impact on our daily life routine. The discussions on social media leave a bad taste in mouth at times and spoil the mood. So these debates are creating a negative impact on our daily life as well. The language we use in social media, very much becomes the part of our daily life.

There is a simple rule of debate, mentioned in Quran (chap 25, v 63 and v 72)

‘The (faithful) slaves of the Beneficent are they who walk upon the earth modestly, and when the foolish ones address them answer: Peace; (63).

And those who will not witness vanity, but when they pass near senseless play, pass by with dignity. (72)

Peaceful debates and dialogues are healthy and needed to develop better understanding of the situation and working towards solutions. The strife for winning an argument or point scoring will not help us. Competition is a good thing but when we compete in terms of leg-pulling, it becomes destructive. Constructive debates are only those, where we share the knowledge and experience to develop a better understanding.