I would like to share with you my perspective on the phenomenon known as “social networking”. We keep hearing about it and keep discussing it as current affairs close to us physically as well as culturally. Employers are often (not all of them, of course) unhappy the way this new addictiveness among young people is taking away the time and minds from what we call in sober parlance “work”. Parents complain about teenagers and older children smoking on and off their thoughts, impulses and even small-time chitchats through this fogscreen of web. On the other hand, a section of entrepreneurs and capitalists are excited about the huge profit and public relations possibilities of this new medium, undoubtedly the heartthrob of youth and the about-to-be-grown-ups.
Mr Charlie, CEO of a Bangalore-based dot com company (which survived the Dot com bust of the year 2001 and are again picking up), is not very happy about this so far as his office work culture is concerned. He says, “My employees who are mostly between 22 and 28 years of age are hopelessly ensnared by Twitter and blogging, and umpteen number of social networking sites. This habit of useless gossip is damaging their mental health and seriousness and affecting productive manhours, which is why I am seriously considering blocking some of the sites from them at working hours.”
I could see that Mr Charlie is actually more bothered about the value system of this new phenomenon than commercial losses. In an afterthought, he added, “I have made this company happen through blood and tears nd a lot of sweat really and we did this through hardest work and focus. All this new casual attitude is hampering the kids from coming up on their feet. They are making them softies.” Mr Charlie is in his mid-fifties; he started his career in Silicon Valley, then shifted to India where he worked his way up the hard way. Social networking was not an available tool or recreation back then.
My friend Rahman, another brilliant engineer-turned CEO, is recently back from the US and is worried over a couple of late teenage kids on this and other issues. He views social networking as a practice encouraging permissiveness and excessive liberalism which would harm the thinking habit and moral fabric of younger generation. When I told him that people like Manmohan Singh and Shah Rukh Khan also blog and twitter, he sardonically replied, “Oh, the show people…” And then added, “Don’t you see these are grown-ups and know their good and bad, they know what they are doing…”
Namita, a young and vibrant journalist turned entrepreneur (she is running an education business in Pune and has big dreams about e-learning) gave me a different side of the story. “Dear Mr Laha, can you think of something else which would give you three unbeatable reasons to practise social networking: unwind and free interaction with people from all over the places in such an informal and unbinding mode, exchange notes on social and professional matters with peers known and unknown and pick their brains without charges and last but not the least, position yourself neatly within an intelligent audience forum.”
Namita is thirty-three and has both vibrancy of youth and sagacity of the mature. The reason behind the success of Silicon Valley is that people communicate and exchange ideas with friends and strangers in different settings where they unwind and socialize.
As Jesus verily said, “Man does not live by bread alone.” A social animal, it is instinctive for human beings to network socially with or without Internet. What the average kid does on Orkut or Facebook is no different from the youth of earlier generations did in the assemblies of dance and music, bars and inns, friends’ places and Friday nights at some wild indoors or outdoors customized for a group. Even now, children like to hang around malls, watch people and eat ice creams with friends of the same and opposite gender. What is so new about these sites really I wonder. Yes, there is a revolution in technology, possibly no less lethal than 1921’s Bolshevik revolution in Russia in some significant aspects. Every revolution helps man (and woman) to change significantly and the virtual (digital) and social networking (again digital) revolutions are no exception to that. Like change in the production mode, hunting to farming and farming to manufacturing and manufacturing to knowledge management… the social and virtual networking has, as if by a celestial magic, brought in a paradigm shift (our fathers and uncles would call it sea change) into human interaction. Young people of France and China, India and US, England and Pakistan, Nigeria and Dubai are talking to one another and discovering their mutual connectivity in a far more drastic, faster, unique way that we could not think of even a couple of decades ago.
Dear readers, don’t imagine I am gushing forth in praise of social networking in a blind and thoughtless way which I am not. I was not born yesterday and know how these sites can be also used by manipulators and criminals, perverts and wrong elements of the society. But we all know you cannot expect a shape in a melting pot, that is what comes later. Now still in infancy of web technology and virtual entertainment, it would take considerable way and time, effort and commitment into making a heritage of rules and consensus forms to adhere to by us all in order to benefit from this new platform and leverage this as a growing source of edutainment for youth, and why youth only, middle aged and even older people, lonely and physically challenged.
Every religion on earth and every community or club in every small town started as some social networking centre only. It is human energy and intelligence, passion and insight combined that fuelled very few of them into what they could become at the end. Let us watch the new continent growing. Three cheers for social networking!