Author: manuscrypts

  • Occult of personality

    Recently, Badshah took the rap for allegedly paying for fake views on a music video, in a bid to break a YouTube viewership record. I’m surprised that a lot of folks were surprised! Whether it’s social media (FB, Instagram, Snapchat etc) or media networks (YouTube, TikTok, and largely Twitter too), digital ecosystems have been built around reach. Just like traditional media was. Reach that is then sold to brands and advertisers. Reach that is usually also a poor surrogate for efficiency and effectiveness. That’s why all this reminds me of Goodhart’s law – when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The unintended but predictable consequences of optimising for the measure. So why do brands still do it? Hey, everyone has KRAs and no time for real outcomes. Output is good enough. Influencer marketing does just that. Besides, a case can even be made for credibility in the audience’s mind. But that’s a separate story. (more…)

  • Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture

    Erez Aiden, Jean-Baptiste Michel

    The book was published in 2013, relatively the early days of what has come to be a fairly common buzzword. Therefore, it is probably unfair to expect this book to have the understanding or perspectives that the field has accumulated in the last few years.

    Having said that, I still think my expectation from the book was higher. It stemmed mostly from the title, and I thought there was tremendous scope there. We now consume, produce and share tons of data on a daily basis. What could it say about us at a societal level? Wouldn’t that be a great way to study how our culture has evolved as a species and perhaps differently in various parts of the world? How do ideas spread, how many of them are universal, and do some have more velocity than others? But hold on. While this book does try to give some answers, it is solely based on the authors’ experiments with datasets using Google Books Ngram Viewer.

    This is a formidable tool – 30 million books digitized by Google. But it is limited too. These are only books published, and a subset of them. Books are only a small representation of culture, and by virtue of publishing being gated (in the past) would carry inherent biases. To be fair, the authors are aware of this and bring it up towards the end. It also raises the concerns that have now grown louder – who owns the data, who has access, what is it being used for?

    So, if you go by the title, you might be a little disappointed, but it is an interesting story well told and made accessible. It does provide many, many interesting trends and findings across disparate things like technology, popularity, grammar. You would like it especially if you’re interested in language – words, their usage, grammar etc.

  • Onam, OTT & Culture

    Until recently, I was a fan of Rajinikanth’s screen swag. It wasn’t just the recent releases that dampened my enthusiasm. When Kabali released, I was awed. Not just by the performance, but by what I then thought was statesmanship. That was when a Tamil colleague schooled me on contexts, including politics, that I had no clue about. Since then, though I haven’t stopped watching regional movies, I stop at an ” I liked/didn’t like it”.

    Onam reminded me of this. Or rather, it served as a trigger to write this. It began with the chatter around Malayalam films, thanks to OTT. Movies, I have believed, are a cultural phenomenon. On one hand, when someone who is not a Malayali talks up a movie, I am happy about the “cultural exchange”. When that develops into a misplaced sense of authority and expertise, it becomes irritating. When it goes into the level of actors apologising because idiots don’t get references, it becomes angst. Of course you have never heard of Pattanapravesham! You have to go 32 years back to know the damn context. “Can you please end subtitles?” Nuances, commentary, references are often lost in translation. But that’s a two-way street, and movies are a business. [Aside: This could be the next level of Amazon Prime’s X-Ray feature, or even an Alexa skill]

    Onam itself has been hijacked quite a bit by Insta influenza. In the real world, in non-Corona years, this means you hear “haath se khaana padega?”, if you’re waiting to pick up your sadya in a restaurant. Or, worse case, if you’re waiting for a table, all the best. The photoshoot takes time. But this is a relatively smaller threat. The larger one plays out on Twitter –  the politics of Vaman Jayanthi (h added for spite) vs Mahabali! With Malayalis participating instead of celebrating, with snide comments in Keralese. Ha! And all I want to do is wear my mundu, eat my sadya, drink alcohol, watch a movie and in general, have a nice day. That, I have realised, cannot co-exist with being present on social media on that day.

    Access to culture has become easy. You don’t need to learn Malayalam to watch a movie. You also don’t need a Malayali friend to eat a sadya. Both the language and the friend would have helped set context, and contributed to a deeper understanding. But who cares in the age of superficiality and instant gratification?

    I realise that a lot of this is just angst – at a couple of well kept secrets being commoditised, trivialised, and hijacked beyond redemption. I don’t really like labels, but at what point does this become cultural appropriation? Onam is only a few days. I am more worried about cinema. Because the presence of an observer changes what is created. With expanded audience comes more money. When products, and festivals start catering to new tastes, what becomes of the originals, and the audience they used to cater to?

    For now, vannonam, kandonam, thinnonam, pokkonam. Please.

    P.S. Self analysis: Is this how curmudgeons are born?

  • How Emotions Are Made

    Lisa Feldman Barrett

    Just when I thought I was getting some stability (in my thinking) on the free will vs determinism debate, here comes fresh food for thought. As per ‘How Emotions Are Made’, while the combination of genetic and environmental factors do determine our behaviour, free will has a definite play.

    The core theme of the book is a constructionist theory of how emotions are made, as opposed to a classic theory. The classical view assumes that each emotion has a unique ‘fingerprint’, as against the opposing view that variation is the norm. This has implications not just on how we physically manifest our emotions but on our understanding of how the nervous system operates as well. And finally, the classical view believes that emotions are inborn and universal. But the alternate view is that emotions are formed based on shared concepts, influenced by social reality and culture.

    The view of the brain as a tiered system (survival, emotion, cognition) is one of the first myths that the author breaks. Further, as opposed to being the result of a stimulus-response mechanism, emotions are a result of the brain simulating and predicting, based on a bunch of factors. What we call emotions – anger, fear, happiness etc- are concepts that get created and honed in the brain. Concepts, goals, words all help the brain frame any new stimulus it receives and then predict. By reframing concepts and looking at them more objectively, we can reshape what emotions are surfaced, and thus exercise free will.

    Towards the middle of the book, the author sets up the answer for “are emotions real” with the classic philosophical question of “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. The answer is that both fall under the “perceiver-dependent” category. Emotions are thus, a social reality and become real because of collective intentionality and our ability to communicate using words.

    This understanding of emotions, and how much we control/are in control has implications on a lot of things ranging from our daily behaviour to the way the judiciary system works and how we deliver justice.

    ‘How Emotions Are Made’ is refreshing because of the alternate perspectives, all of which are backed by science. The author makes it a point to call out hypotheses where it’s not. The language is technical only when needed and explanations are lucid. In all, it is a fascinating book that has made me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about myself and the world. Not an easy read, but absolutely worth the time. And that’s why it made it to my 2019 favourites.

  • Comfort Zoned

    I think it was in a Taleb book that I read that writing was born because of accounting. In my case, as I have chronicled here earlier (2010, 2017), my account books pretty much tell the story of our life. Towards the end of the second post, I wrote “the days of our lives have found a rhythm, a familiarity….Wild zigzags giving way to smooth curves and then straight lines.” This is because our routines, and therefore, expenses were predictable. The last few months have obviously meant a few changes, but the ballpark is the same. This stability has also meant that the usage of xls/sheets have increased at the expense of the book. I suspect this change is permanent, and it does make me sad.

    What it has also made me think about is the subject of the “comfort zone”. My work domain is marketing, and there’s no way I am getting into any comfort zone there. But for all practical purposes,  in my personal life, my perception is that I have hit a comfort zone. Many of my posts in the Flawsophy section have been about my own approach on living one’s life – happiness, success, signalling, the idea of freedom in daily life – and learnings and changes. I think it’ll show that I have a fair idea of our needs and wants, what it takes to get there, and a plan. It has helped that we have avoided lifestyle creep quite a bit, and kids completely, and disproportionate spends are on things we actually enjoy. Self image on that last bit was a challenge until recently, but I think that’s over now. None of these are things that happened overnight, and obviously a work in progress but we’re comfortable with where we are, and where we want to be. (more…)