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Social Networking Websites in India:
Spreading a Social Net
Example of a ‘naive prediction’ from the 80’s:
I foresee a world where interaction, knowledge sharing and voyeurism will be enclosed within one finite space; where casual visiting, peeping and eavesdropping would merge to the point of being indistinguishable. A day would come when parties and social gatherings would lose their zing with personal presence being replaced my mere abstraction.
A lesson learnt in 2008:
Never snub a forecast because it seems too gigantic for actualization and too optimistic of what the future can behold. Two decades is time enough to turn any human fantasy to reality.
A rational and a rather academic way of defining social networking would be, “A social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations”.
Now is the time to look at the concept of Social Networking parenthetically.
Vishal Chawla, our point of reference for this entire case study, grew up on Enid Blyton, Pop music and Manmohan Desai movies. His social structure had constantly instilled in him the belief that a positive outlook is what is essential to succeed in life and that life in itself is a “Beautiful Gift of God”.
Hugely popular among his set of friends, the basic attitude that dictated his life was “Nothing is impossible”. A software engineer by profession, Vishal looked up to ‘Bill Gates’ though he did not subconsciously realize how much he revered ‘Adam Smith’.
Vishal joins Orkut, a hugely popular social networking site.
Time trundles along and Vishal perceives a change in him. It’s a marked transformation with his tastes undergoing a sense of diffusion. Enid Blyton is replaced by Dostoevsky, Pop Music by Schumann and Ingmar Bergman takes over Manmohan Desai.
For good or for bad, Vishal today is an atheist and thinks of pessimism as a holier concept than optimism. To his friends, Vishal is no longer the eye-candy of social gatherings but a mere add-on.
Two years down the line today, the only thing about Vishal that has remained virtually unaffected is his ‘Orkut Membership’.
This might sound like a sad story to some but it really isn’t if I tell you that three months into the future, Vishal is going to chuck his current profession and direct a movie. Apparently, he met with a set of people on Orkut, some wannabe directors, whom he believes will help him reach out for his true calling.
Although this is a fictional account, it isn’t an extreme case for validation. Let’s just look at this situation objectively. Vishal arrived at this social networking site equipped with certain specific set of attributes. He acquired the source of his transformation on this very site and interacted with these sources on a one-on-one basis via the same. The influence that these sources exerted brought about a change in his perception and lifestyle, instilling in him a set of attributes that are almost complimentary to the one he had grown up imbibing.
Vishal is a different person today but the medium that facilitated this transformation in him was reactive enough to accept Vishal in his latest ‘avatar’ and take it on from there.
Yes!!!
That’s where Social Networking sites score in my opinion; the very fact that they are built on people and further managed and propagated by people themselves. Social Networking succeeds in a big way because it directly connects with its target audience and lets them design their own space.
It’s not just a place for those who love to socialize but also for the anti-socials, because the anti-socials might just end up discovering each other on a social networking site!
Orkut, My Space, Face book, Jhoom, Yaari, Fropper, Linkedin... The list is burgeoning.
These sites don’t intend to serve you, but instead spread out for you a buffet voluntarily prepared by people like you. They then ask you to go fill your plate with as much as you can. You might feel heavy, bloated or sleepy tomorrow but today you binge!!!
There is no point in debating today whether Social Networking as a concept stands a chance of being successful in India. That would be like pontificating about Picasso’s sculpting talents.
Social Networking being a successful concept in India is a case of admission than introspection. Any bottlenecks that it faced in its establishment period could be attributed to an average Indian’s limitations in accessing it in its greenhorn days. But the “establishment” phase of social networking was relatively miniscule and it moved onto the “exploration phase” in a rather quick span of time.
As it stands on the threshold of moving from the “exploration” to the “maintenance” phase, let us analyze the reasons for its popularity as we see it today.
Indians are in my opinion the loudest proponents of the Aristotelian theory of ‘Man being a social animal’. We believe in the Catholic theory of ‘Coming together’. And we are inherently conditioned to search for others like us. Social Networking works out well for us in this regard, because it offers an interest-based segregation of individuals. Like minded people can then come together to discuss or ideate and the disparaging ones can walk in for pure knowledge. Some of those who walk in for knowledge may become connoisseurs of a subject tomorrow and attract more casual onlookers in search of posterity.
Another aspect of us Indians that Social Networking sites cleverly exploit is our over-hinging on nostalgia. We tend to magnify memories and amplify times bygone. Social Networking sites are inherently structured to create a web-like linking of people. So, if you manage to trace an old school friend of yours, chances of you bumping into thirty more increases rather substantially.
While the detractors of this concept argue about the lack of privacy that social networking sites provide, what they don’t realize is that it’s this natural human tendency of mopping in public that social networking sites are cashing on. The human mind derives immense amount of pleasure in partial concealment and revelations and it’s just that aspect of our psyche that’s coming into play here. If we are seeking total privacy then why come to a social networking site at all?
Like I had mentioned before, social networking as a concept is fast moving from the exploration to the generative stage. It has a set of loyal visitors today and there are newer ones looking to nest.
While the former set’s on lookout for something new, the latter ones are merely searching for a sense of comfort wrapped in a web-page. Their loyalty to this concept would depend on how well social networking would be able to balance the features it offers to how simplified its user interface is. A trade-off between the two is what would dictate fresh inflows.
However, for those who have already found their cushy spaces and are restless for more, social networking needs to march ahead in search of newer horizons. Visualize as much as you can.
And trust what Fellini said “A visionary is the only true realist”
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