Digging for Meaning

Someone just 'liked' an old photo of mine on Facebook. And I was wondering why/how would anyone do that? I mean what makes them either seek out someone else's profiles or more probably go scroll down tens of times, down the rabbit hole of their facebook timeline. Don't get me wrong, I do not dislike it. As a matter of fact, I can't help keeping an eager lookout on the notification from Facebook like those rats in the lab who are made to learn to respond to electric pleasure signals. And I understand that the act of 'liking' is a delicate matter. A like is a badge that one carefully chooses. Every like contributes to one's own sense of self, a carefully constructed persona. 'Am I close enough to the person to react to his/her updates?' 'Hope I do not come across as someone naive/ over eager/ un cool' 'Will it send wrong signal if I like this?' My limited curiosity came up with only these questions/thoughts that possibly ...

Have you ever shouted out in a valley and laughed out in incredibly playful happiness? The marvel that is echo. (umberto, go sit down in that corner :P) Isn't it beautiful? to hear yourself. louder. bigger. from unknown corners. delayed, almost leisurely. Whatever age you may be, the moment you do it, you turn 6 year old faster than the speed of sound. You may try to hide yourself, but don't you for that moment become that annoying little kid who gives you creases on your forehead in annoyance and ripples of laughter in your heart? But this echo is temporary. after the 10th echo, you will start getting tired. (it actually involves physical efforts you know? yeah. really. the very concept of any real physical effort outside of a gym will soon become extinct, i know. hmmm.. whatever ) There is no more novelty to it as well. The echo is going to come out exactly the way it has been coming all this while. There is no more mystery left to it. But, there is another magical e...

What makes one cling to fantasies so dearly? I can understand the impulse to run away from your life. But what color is your courage that pushes you beyond the limits of truth? To suspend reality and recede in thoughts. To forget and to belong. I just saw a docudrama ' catfish '. The movie chronicles online exchanges that is just about to evolve into a  relationship which takes a new turn due to uncovering of a deception. While I suspect that it might be scripted itself, it certainly strikes you with its reality. Our reality, that is only defined by the deceptions around us. How fragile are we? To need to run away from reality so often? So your partner vice is the cigarette, his' is grass (respect!), her's is booze, but everyone's hooked onto the internet the most. Kids slip deep under the blanket to escape reality. But when someone takes away the blanket, the kid has to face the real world. Game over. Grown ups shut down the world around and populate the wor...

I have 445 people on my friend's list on Facebook. 41 yet waiting on invite list. What does it mean? If I pass by these 486 people on the street, would we stop, genuinely smile and have a conversation? Would we really care when we would ask 'how are you?'. I know of these people, mostly. Some of them are really close friends. Some are people I would like to be friends to. But most others are only joined by an association. Mostly through my post graduate school, MICA. If I do a test of walking by all these 486 people, how many would I have to remove from the list? why should I be bothered by this number really? Well, primarily cause it confuses me. Is it right for me to see these photos? should i comment? how will they perceive my comment? With people you know closely enough there is no space for these questions. There are handful of people who I would turn to for any sort of help .There are a few more with whom I would like to share stuff.  The rest are mostly irrelevant...

i am a big fan of Ólafur Elíasson and his creations. absolutely brilliant stuff. even working as an account executive in tribal ddb, i try to push installation ideas like these for campaigns when i can. (well i am fresh off the campus, u c). i have always been interested in the choice of mediums used by artists to respond to cultural shifts. digital technologies have certainly changed the way we live and also the way in which we reflect, we communicate, we perceive. no wonder then that some brilliant work is happening world over that explores the implications of digital intervention in our lives. one such excellent project i came across was called ' fashion victims '. the reason i loved this project is because i have always advocated communication of efforts that goes into consumption. i have discussed this here and here and here .. in fashion victims, the mobile communication has been given a tangible face. the electromagnetic radiation converted as patterns on clothes. ch...

Gunda . rick-roll . three wolves moon . what is common in all these memes? all went viral and reached millions. true. all are immensely successful in creating a subculture around themselves. true. and all were so bad, that they were classic in some respect. and here's an insight that perhaps can be exploited to create brands online. who can forget mithun's 'do char cheh aath dus, bus'. or numerous people rickrolled online and offline. or the amazingly mediocre t-shit selling like hotcakes. (hmm.. i have never seen hotcakes sales figures really.. or a queue for buying it. where did this expression come from anyways.) all these examples treaded on a fine balance. an exactitude of badness that necessarily has to go beyond mediocrity. i will not ponder on the measures that need to be undertaken to be exactly bad enough to get viral, but rather lets take a little time to appreciate that it pays to be bad. (hmm.. by that logic i should get an increment in my salary.. ahh.. n...

sheer awesomeness that is youtube.. a while back i was searching for bryan adam's song ' here i am' on youtube. the video is that of the song alright, but the music that gets played is something else altogether. this is something that is happening regularly, with big music labels stripping their audio content from youtube. * well the awesomeness is in what youtube has done in this situation. the audio that gets played instead is of, presumably, other artists who want to market their music but don't have big labels to back them. youtube puts a label which indicates where the content is sourced from. the link takes to the artist's youtube page. well, in this case the track is pritty shitty. but i see a brilliant opportunity here for youtube to make money on something that was a cause of headache to them earlier.. wonderful strategy by them. smart buggers.. and it helps the small guys as well, the small guy gets to ride on some established reputation and gets sampled. ...

It happened a while back when we were going to Lothal on bikes early in the morning. Before going off, we were sitting at Chhota (canteen in MICA) for tea. I heard a rajasthani/kutchie folk song being played somewhere. It sounded interesting. It was coming off a cell phone of boy who worked at Chhota. (the guy in the pic) I asked him if it was radio and what channel. He said that it was mp3s. i was intrigued. i asked where he got it from. He replied 'internet pe milta hai na'.. He had downloaded the songs on a friend's cell phone, then from there he bluetoothed it to his cell. we were all :O then. Among the ten of us who were going to the trip, hardly half had bluetooth or GPRS enabled phones. :P Here I am. I write paper on digital natives. Am intereseted in media effects of new media. and I still havent used bluetooth (except for on laptop). :| It was a wonderful moment :D

When one talk of DN, some of the strongest ramifications of this concept is in the field of education. Indeed, the increasing ineffectiveness of education system n pedagogy were the reasons that the concept of DN came to fore. A few days back, I was thinking of the same while attending a lecture, and thought of an experiment. Essentially, I want to experiment if teaching efficacy increases if we uses multiple media simultaneously during the course of lecture. A normal class here at MICA, employs visual aids (projector, boards, charts, papers), audio aids (speakers, mics) but the use of this media is mostly one sided (though the class participation usually is quite high in conventional sense. Laptops are 'down' during lecture though, faculty just doesn't trust us :P). what i propose is use of social media such as twitter, social networks, wikis etc real time during a lecture to create a more collaborative atmosphere in a lecture. I talked with prof. Chandan Chatterjee about...

I found something pertinent and am posting it here verbatim - A search of the Nexis database of English-language publications worldwide finds zero uses of the phrase before 2005 but 600 since then. It appeared in The New York Times apparently for the first time in a quote on May 24: “Unlike people 65 and older who immigrated online after spending their youths thumbing through reference books, today’s children are digital natives who are fluent in the language of online searches,” said Marc Prensky, an educational consultant and the author of ‘’Don’t Bother Me Mom — I’m Learning!'’

It all started with emoticons. the simple one's - :P, ;) the anime one's - (0_0) , (u_u), (^-^)b... then avatars in chat. Secondlife took it to a whole other level, where an alternate reality is constructed. It is an internet based virtual world launched in 2003, developed by Linden Research, Inc . A downloadable client program called the Second Life Viewer enables its users, called "Residents", to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade items (virtual property) and services with one another. (source - wikipedia article) well, the real thing of consequence about second life is that, that it has a virtual currency - Linden Dollar (Linden, or L$) and is exchangeable for real world currencies in a resident to resident marketplace fac...

Arrgghh.. the ethical questions hound us? or do they? digital natives are devided over the ethical question regarding free downloads, piracy etc. and its reflected in popular media thus ... Wierd Al Yankovic's 2006 song 'don't download this song' was one of his first outright political songs. See the kickass video of the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz-grdpKVqg . The song was released exclusively on August 21, 2006 as a digital download . It is a style parody of "We Are the World" and other similar charity songs. The song "describes the perils of online music file-sharing" in a tongue-in-cheek manner." - wikipedia Here we see Wierd Al's strong criticism of file sharing of paid content. However at the same time we have MC Lars's response with his song 'download this song' where he says - Hey Mr. Record Man The joke’s on you Running your label Like it was 1992 Hey Mr. Record Man, Your system can’t compete It’s the ...

People. stand up and give me some listen. There's some kickass mighty awesomish research going on the west coat of US. check this out --> collegehumor The video is a demonstration about microsoft's new products - seadragon and photo synth . The reason I am so kicked about this technology is its potential to revolutionise the way we perceive and organize digital information. This has humongous sociological implications. Seadragon essentially aims to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network. It promises : Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen. Transitions are smooth as butter. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution. Combine this with Photosynth which takes a large collection of photos ...

Mobile Communication The media landscape has changed dramatically in recent decades, from one predominated by traditional mass communication formats to today’s more personalized network environment. Mobile communication plays a central role in this transition, with adoption rates that surpass even those of the Internet. The widespread diffusion and use of mobile telephony is iconic of a shift toward a new ‘ personal communication society’ , evidenced by several key areas of social change, including symbolic meaning of the technology, new forms of coordination and social networking, personalization of public spaces, and the mobile youth culture. The increasingly personal nature of communication technology in the desire for ‘perpetual contact’ would shape the device and its usage. The symbolic significance of mobile communication devices is part and parcel of the progression from a mass to a network toward a personal communication society. Personal communication technologies are dis...

The digital Ecosphere is made up of all the electronic gadgetry that helps people to stay connected to others, that helps them access and experience the media and content(entertainment, information) and that that helps them make life a bit easier in general due to digital intervention. So the improved refrigerator that communicates to your cell phone when the milk carton is empty is a part of digital ecosphere, however the traditional refrigerator is not. For our purpose here, we would assume the digital ecosphere to be made up of digital devices that have components of communication and content creation/delivery only. Every one has its own ecosphere defined by the individual usage. So, one might prefer watching TV, but someone else might use TIVO or computer to watch the same content. Thus the importance of various devices differ with users. Lets try to understand this through the concept of 'personal circuit'. personal circuits are unique and habitual behavior patterns of med...

Digital Ecosphere I The digital natives, survive on the “digital oxygen” of portable music, ubiquitous connection through cell phone, and would avoid going to places where these connections – that connects them to their friends, multimedia, information, etc – might cease. (this would have implications for travel, tourism n transport industry) This ecosphere is composed of digital devices such as cell phones, portable music players, computer/Laptop, TiVo (and such digital tools that transfer control of content of mass media to the user), digital camera, gaming consoles etc. These devices essentially cater to the following characteristics of Digital Native: Control: Digital Natives don’t want to be ‘subjected’ to content, but would rather choose what they want to experience. This desire for control affects the preference and use of digital devices around them. Hence DNs would rather watch their favorite TV program on Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) and Web TV. The...

This blog is already 7 posts and exactly 7 days old, and we haven't really set the ground yet. My bad! (another of the DN manifestation - usage of global lingo. check out urbandictionary ) Before going any further lets get to know who we are talking about when we refer 'digital natives' (DN). Is this a matter of age, as some sources define it by the generation born after 1985? Damn! According to this definition, i missed the bus by a year. Would Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons not be Digital Natives? Also, this would be widely variable across geographies, class etc depending upon the nature of digital ecosystem evolution and penetration. So, who are these digital natives? Like a native of a city/state, digital native shares the language, the culture, the habits/mores to a certain degree with fellow technology users. They have distinctive ways of working, learning and socializing. As Marc Prensky would describe it - they share ' the a...

ok. I should have done this earlier. Here's the disclaimer : Most of the content on this blog contains my 'thoughts' and the posts are meant to put forth an argument to elicit some debate. Hence the thoughts might be divergent to opinions u might find elsewhere. Please do let me know if you find some irregularities in the argument and facts. i love debates. :D

Eating up vowels, remixing and mashing up differet names, chopping to convenient length, in quest of originality creating a langauge of our own. wlcm t th lngg f 21st cntry. (welcome to the language of 21st century. well, i did go overboard with this one, but sometimes i wonder, what if vowels do go extinct. how would globalization and fight for identity throughout the world shape the language in this scenario?) In '1984', George Orwell envisioned a new language invented by the establishment - 'newspeak'. It also had shortforms, mashups, and similar traits to the one we are seeing in the web 2.0 era. however, the context is polar opposite. In the novel, the language is a product of an authoritarian regime, whereas the the new language we are helping to shape is a ramification of demographic nature of the new media and new digital technologies. Even here, the demographic that is at the forefront of this change is the DNs - the young and technologically savvy. A look at t...

The last post was sooo teel dear. Well, for the uninitiated teel dear (tl;dr) = Too long; didn’t read. In this twitter age, I know I have sinned with my preposterously long posts earlier in the blog. But let me assure you, I am trying to be rid of the disease, and I am a advocate for brevity. I had even started a community on orkut about it. btw, this blog is about the new proverbs that this digital age is creating and how and what they indicate. please do add to the list, any proverbs that has digital native connotation to it. 1. all your base are belong to us - This legendary statement connoting victory in gaming was born of bad translation of Japanese in an arcade game. The words though since have grown bigger and find relevance outside of gaming enthusiasts aswell. 2. Information wants to be free " - It is an expression that has come to be the unofficial motto of the free content movement. Its philosophical implications pervade all things digital and its shaping the way ...