Twittervolutions aren’t Real Revolutions: Why India needs to take to the Streets

Recently there has been a lot of debate over what role social media, twitter in particular  played in the uprisings in the Middle East. Many said these platforms were important but others pushed the envelope by saying that these revolutions wouldn’t be successful without social media. The ongoing case of Anna Hazare’s fast unto death against Lokpal Bill in India is a natural experiment to test these arguments.

As I write: On ground: Sh Hazare’s fast has entered the second day today. There seems some momentum (150-200 people at Jantar Mantar) similar numbers in central locations in some other cities around the country.

On twitter: Thousands of people are tweeting their support.Many thousands more are ‘retweeting’ these tweets further. The topics are also top trends in twitter. There are 20-30 new tweets flowing in every minute for the last 3 hrs at least.  I ask ‘SO WHAT’.

I suspect the actual impact is nowhere as strong as the volume of tweets would suggest.Get into the content of tweets.

1. It is mostly self styled opinion leaders, film stars and other celebrities enhancing their own brand value by tweeting for a good cause. These tweets are being retweeted by their followers.
2. Another category of tweets is the news channels trying to enhance their viewership by seeking opinion polls and advertising telecasts related to the issues.
3. Of course some jokes are among the most circulated tweets.

In sum, there is no collective action being planned actively on twitter nor is twitter contributing to more people joining the actual movement.

Overall the movement remains as strong or weak as it would have remained without this social media intervention. Perhaps there is greater awareness but to my mind tweeting about this is not very different for a majority of people than say congratulating the Indian team for winning the cricket world cup.

In short, despite the immense exuberance on social media, this revolution is yet to become exuberant on the steets, which was the defining aspect of Middle East uprisings. For instance, Interntional news websites (like BBC, CNN and NYT) do not even have a mention of it on their home pages.

They and many others will only take note when Indians in large numbers  take their tweets to the streets.

To become comfortable with the new, learn from the old:FaceBook and the Phone-Book

Recently a friend informed me about how she ‘unfriends’ people in her FB list from time to time. These are mostly people who she doesn’t perceive any reason for them to be in her network. I thought she was an odd one out. But a small survey (among my FB network) revealed that 2/3rd of my 50 respondents deleted existing friend connections regularly.

I do admit that my FB network isn’t exactly restricted to friends. Many, in fact are less than acquaintances. If I run through the complete list, I am sure I won’t remember when I last interacted with at least 50% of the people. Worse for about some10% I even won’t know who they are!
However, it never really bothers me that there are people on my Facebook who aren’t really friends or acquaintances. For reasons I will explain here:

Think of a typical social interaction today – Say I meet a friend’s friend at a dinner. We talk and one of us suggests that we stay in touch. The next day s/he sends me an FB request. We never really interact after that and perhaps ever won’t but remain on each others’ FB.
Rewind 5 years – Same people. Similar meeting place. Similar conversations. One suggests we stay in touch. I take out my mobile phone, ask his/her number and give a missed call. Consequently we have each others’ numbers on our cellphone address books.
Rewind 20 years – We pull out our pocket telephone/address diaries and store (write) each others’ contact details down. ( Someone in the group is organized enough to carry a pen or we ask the bearer at the restaurant!)

At what stage did one delete these so called lapsed contacts from one’s phone or a diary. When one ran into space problems, or bought a new phone or a new diary and had to transfer contacts.

FB basically allows you to create a very elaborate phone diary with extensive details (of course access controlled) that you can link to one another. Yes FB in principal is nothing more than a digital manifestation of the good old telephone/address diary. Except that there is no limitations of size or memory.
Thinking of FB as a the new shared, crowd-sourced phone book, you could perhaps stop deleting your unwanted friends.
Of course do not forget to invoke your privacy settings when you add a connection!

Holiday Ruminations: Bollywood, Radio Show and Beyond!

I have not written anything. in a long time. Perhaps was too busy in academic writing till school ended and too busy unwinding since the holidays began. Or maybe I simply did not come across any event or thought that was compelling to blog about. This motivates yet another question, how worthy an endeavor is it to write for writing sake. Just the fact that I haven’t updated my blog in a while means should I write ‘something’. I thought otherwise and thus haven’t written altogether. I finally decided, what the heck, let me try , writing for writing sake. After all the gallery I play to here, is friends and acquaintances who use this forum to keep in touch with me. So this is a post about what I have been upto in my Holidays, home alone in a snowy windy, white Evanston.

Thanks to a Netflix subscription, I watched Outsourced. Although rife with the usual stereotypes about India, the film was pretty well made. For those who haven’t seen , the movie is the story of an American Executive who comes to India to set up a call centre in a small town and train his replacements. At first he is quite uncomfortable but on the advice of a fellow American in Bombay, he decides to give ‘India a try’. I particularly enjoyed how playing Holi was the turning point in his tale. The movie apart, being from ‘Big Cities’ , I would be very keen to know if such small town call centers really exist? And how are they different from the swanky ones in Gurgaon and Bangalore.

Not many know, but I occasionally volunteer to be RJ on a show called Lotus Beat on our Northwestern Radio Station. It’s a fun experience and more so as the show has a lot of listeners coming from the Indian Neighborhoods of Chicago. We take phone in requests and get 5-7 calls per week.

Since today was the last show of the year, and for the first time I was a solo host, I had the task of creating a theme and the play-list. The most logical thing would have been to recap the year gone by. But the (sad) truth is I am not aware of most happenings in Bollywood in the last 1 year. I decided to expand the scope to the last 10 years. I called the show Bollywood’s ‘Defining Movies, Defining Music’ from 2001 to 2010. As a ready reckoner I used this list that Shailesh Kapoor, a die hard Bollywood enthusiast, a connection from my media industry days in Bombay, has put together.

But as I progressed through the show Starting from Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai ( Both 2001) and included Taare Zameen Pe, Rang De Basanti and 3 Idiots. I thought I could very well call this an Aamir Khan special. I did put in Chake De India and Kal Ho Na Ho for SRK fans, but couldn’t go very far. Salman Khan was missing, so was Abhishek Bacchan ( I put in Delhi 6 purely for its music though). Some requests from listeners were ‘Woh Lamhe’ and ‘Anjana Anjani’. Among other non blockbuster variety I played was ‘Dor’ and ‘Life in a Metro’. Another set of films which ‘defined’ the decade were Sanjay Dutt starrers, the two Munnabhai movies.

Am I right then in concluding, that if the ‘defining moments’ from 2001-2010 period in the annals of Bollywood history had to single out one ‘defining’ personality, It would be Aamir Khan? ( SRK and Sallu Fans let me know if you think otherwise!)

If all my working friends envious of my ‘holidays’ by now 🙂 Then I have hit home run. Maybe writing for writing sake is not such a bad idea after all.

Lets Abuse TAM Data: Indian TV Industry

I read an ad in Mint about UTV-Bloomberg claiming that they have grown to no. 2 in the English Business News Space.

Lets Abuse TAM Data

Surprised I decided to look closely:
Well in the Male CS 25-44 (all SECs) Segment All India market they had slightly greater channel share (relative) than NDTV Profit and ET NOW according to TAM. For the uninitiated channel share is the product of no of people who watched at least one minute ( reach) and the average time spent by them.

I have three issues with this kind of abuse of TAM numbers :
1. The target for English Business News Channels is much smaller than the one used in the ad. Perhaps CS 25-44 M SEC A and B in 10 lakh plus towns would be more plausible.

2. The use of relative shares is again a misleading measure. In reality the absolute of share of viewing of these channels is minuscule to total television viewing so how many combined minutes of television viewing does this really mean?

3. The third is with the use of TAM for such data.English business news is a very niche segment.
a.) This genre is consumed by respondents who are hard to recruit for high involvement research like TAM.
b). Besides consumption is outside the home ( at public places, offices etc).
c.) The sample sizes for these channels is so low that these fluctuations may be due to sampling errors.

But the saddest part is that our media planners will continue to spend advertising money based on these irrelevant numbers and think they are making scientifically correct decisions.

I hope students of media/ advertising /marketing can learn this before going to the industry.

The whole point is ‘Lost in Translation’

Harsh Taneja – (संपादित करें) – 4 संबंधित साइट – 71 अनुसरणकर्ता
1 और व्यक्ति ने आपका अनुसरण प्रारंभ कर दिया है!

This is the first page of my Google buzz when I made Hindi the primary language of my Google account.
For starred emails they use the words Tarankit.
For saving an email as draft – they say “Abhi Sahejen” . Something as simple as forwarding an email they say “aagroshit karien”.

I consider Hindi as my first language, and have studied it all the way through high school. Yet most of the terms they use were new to me. I could only continue to do these operations, as I have used Gmail long enough in English and know what all the buttons do. Agreed I am no scholar of Hindi, but am not challenged either? Are scholars of Hindi expected to use the internet in Hindi or lay people who are often deprived of any kind of education beyond high school.

Why can’t forward be simply “auron ko bhejo” , starred mail be ” nishan lagao” and so on so forth ?
Ever heard that internet content in local language can help make it more mass. But then it should be the language of the masses and not something that only Hindi teachers will understand.