Tag: community

  • Kaumpromise

    There is nothing quite like death to shake a worldview. There is a reset that happens in one’s head, and the relationship or even lack of it, changes this only in degree, not kind. There is no immunity either, by now, I’d know.

    This one took me out of my comfort zone, in terms of physical location. In the last year or so, especially since the previous time I encountered death, I’ve felt myself become a tad more dispassionate about Cochin as relationships seem a lot more fragile. I am myself much to blame, decades of muscle memory of holding others at arm’s length is hard to shake off. And this is beyond Cochin, and in a place where I have avoided staying for more than a night. Each time I have tried to tell myself that my creature comforts can be skipped for a few days, there has been a rebellion within and I’ve been forced to say “I can’t.”

    I brace myself this time too, and stood in a corner, observing others. I think we all are capable of projecting an aura of “do not approach” when we so want. Mine is at full blast. And yet, one child (whom I first knew as literally a child, and is now about to become a CA) breaks through it, and asks me if I I am ok, if I need anything. Maybe it is that, maybe it is the death gut punch, or maybe it is my newfound willingness to look at (at least some of) the world without a ‘transaction alert’ warning, but the next evening, I am at the table for evening tea, doing stuff I do when I am comfortable with people – pulling their legs, except these are people I had never even said a decent hello to. The day after, I am pushing someone to accept something the family feels he should take, and he is reluctant. They’re all crying, I think I might have forgotten how to. Says a lot.

    But the larger facade broke before that evening at the table, as I watch folks of all forms walk through the door to catch a last glimpse of the one who had passed. It strikes me that I didn’t know more than a few people who would care to drop in to see me before I went up in smoke. The image of an old man, barely able to move a few steps, break down in grief, is still alive in my mind. Sometimes, I realise, it takes death to understand the meaning of life.

    A few days later, I am back in Bangalore. I see the unhindered adulteration in packaged food, in the things that restaurants do, and in general, the greed in every seller, I wonder if that is what has been lost when faceless people sell things to faceless others. It is easier to not care when you don’t see the people you harm. That is not an option in a smaller community or at least it gets punished faster.

    I am also reminded of what else family and community can do when I read Milan Kundera’s brutal take (in Identity) on why friendship isn’t in vogue these days.

    Milan Kundera Friendship

    When I zoom out of my individualistic approach, I realise I had seen community the way it was meant to be. Life savings in cooperatives, because it’s a world in which everyone still knows everyone else or is just a degree of connection away. Local cable over OTT because births and deaths and important local news is covered in the former. It isn’t perfect, and I won’t romanticise it because I know I wouldn’t be able to tolerate the scrutiny beyond short bursts, but its manifestations are revelatory. As the insightful narrator in Gullak says, yeh trauma bhi hai aur therapy bhi. And I wonder what the proverbial middle path is.

  • The more things change….

    Just a couple of weeks back, I’d written about influence and context, and last week the twitterverse had some excitement delivered courtesy Disney. I couldn’t experience it first hand, but got quite a lot of perspective thanks to Karthik’s post and the comments that followed.

    Personally, instances such as Disney serve as a great filter for keeping track of the trust quotient. I don’t expect agencies/brands/celebrities to be unbiased or disclose, but once upon a time, it was natural for regular twitterati to do that. But times have changed, and all of this is personal philosophy, so I’ll move on.

    On hindsight, and when comparing the patterns of evolution of traditional and social media, the current scenario seems inevitable! Platform – Community – Audience -Brand – Ads (hashtags) – and when ads became noise, brands differentiate by bringing in a fresh voice. (celebrities/micro celebrities) Where we are now is with an army of mini TOIs, relatively more genuine-sounding, and significantly less costly. There are quirks, of course. For instance, brands don’t have to pay the platform to be present, and can incentivise the community to provide publicity. On the flip side, brands are also ‘being held to ransom’ (previous post) by ‘influencers’ and we’ll probably see guns for hire being used by rival brands pretty soon. [Just last week, we saw a tweet from a person working at a competitor stating that she liked shopping at Myntra. One of the various scenarios we considered was a #conspiracytheory – that the moment we used the tweet in some way, the person would prove to be a non-employee and we’d be accused of playing dirty]

    At one point, I really thought (or hoped) social would be new wine, but it has more or less ended up a new bottle. If we continue the evolution pattern, the future is easy to imagine. Context will disappear, and noise will magnify, until the next disruption. But I still have some hope, because the nature of the platforms (and the tools that are getting built) are such that a user can, at least to an extent, mould it according to the way in which he wants to consume it.

    That does take me back to what I said in the last post – people will actively build their own trusted sources. And the real opportunity for brands is still to become a trusted source. Yes, I do think it’s possible, and we have a relaunched buzzword on cue – social business. In fact, there are probably brands doing it already, spending resources to build the foundations so that the hashtag (or its equivalent in the future) is not manufactured for its own sake, but is organically and genuinely built by contextually relevant influencers who can be publicly rewarded for helping the brand meet its business objectives.

    But wait, that was where social platforms started too. Which leads me to wonder if the future of brands and media will always work in cycles, and end up near square one!

    until next time, the more they remain the same…

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  • Brands and Curation

    Content and the need for brands to get into the space of creating it has been a subject discussed here several times. So, when I read about MTV's tumblr voyage, (via) I thought it would serve as a good handle to revisit the subject.

    I thought the choice was platform was in itself a great step. Tumblr, for now, seems completely clued in on how networks, sharing and community work and as MTV notes, is focused on web culture, which can be seen in the way they have designed the service. It also explains why there's nothing new about everyone from media companies to fashion brands hopping on to it.

    Brands as storytellers is also nothing new though new and interesting stories are hard to come by. That's where a crowd can help. Mostly, when brands say they've tried crowdsourcing, it means asking for a caption or a photo or a video that has something to do with their current campaign. There are exceptions like IdeaStorm, Dewmocracy, My Starbuc

    ks Idea etc but that's a small list in the large set of attempts.

    What I liked about MTV's approach was that it is not asking for anything specific. It is establishing a culture of conversation around its domain and with its trademark edgy approach (F*ck yeah!) – internally and externally, making it comfortable for a community to develop. Once that happens generating interesting stories (content) will slowly stop being a constraint. Brands can then chose to play curator, aiding discovery, surfacing interesting ideas, starting a line of thought, and streamlining conversations. And when it feels there's sufficient excitement, scale these up to a larger audience via other distribution channels. Right now, the reverse is how it works – a “come one, come all and quickly contribute to our newly launched endeavour” shout out on traditional media, instead of an organic approach.

    On a different track, this doesn't mean that if the crowd generates everything the agencies will be defunct. On the contrary, and in addition to the implementation, the agencies are probably best suited to play the role of meta curators, moving beyond one way advertising platforms and processes, and using their understanding of the brand to explore new platforms and communication protocols being developed, so that they can advise the brand on every frontier that comes up.

    until next time, tumble along

    Update: Just read that Tumblr hosts more blogs than WordPress now. (via)

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  • ‘What are you doing’ needs an @ reply ? 🙂

    And every so often, we hear about how brands screw up on Facebook and Twitter, these days we even regularly hear how Facebook screws up on itself, and finally we heard about how Twitter ‘screwed up’ on Twitter. In case you missed it, the chronology can be read here.

    And in case you were too lazy to follow the link, Twitter suddenly yanked off an @replies option — a non-default setting to monitor a conversation between someone you follow and someone you don’t, which was only used by 3% of the Twitter universe. In an initial blog post Twitter addressed it from a product design perspective and as a ‘small settings change’. The response from users was whale disproportionate to the 3%, resulting in the trending of #fixreplies . Poor Twitter was actually doing just that, because the 3% users were straining the servers, since each time someone sent an @reply, Twitter had to scan people’s settings to figure out which tweet could appear in whose timeline. The fun part is that we anyway got to hear only half the conversation.

    Let me try to explain quickly A and B follow each other, B follows C, A does not. In the earlier system (where A was one of the 3% who had changed the default option to ‘see all @ replies’) A could see B’s @replies to C. With this change that Twitter made, A stopped seeing it. The ‘fun part’ I mentioned earlier was that A anyway couldn’t see C’s updates, or specifically C’s @replies to B. Anyway, the 3% considered this option as an aid to ‘serendipitous discovery‘ of new people. But I think the trending happened simply because Twitter didn’t tell anyone before they made the change. As one of the 3% (I think, since I clearly remember finding people based on the @replies of those i follow. Shefaly, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we started following each other thanks to our individual conversations with @dina) I think its a  mistake if the Twitter blog was updated without studying all the aspects, a bigger mistake if Twitter chose not to tell users the real reason.

    Twitter then blogged once more emphasising that the technical aspects, more than the product design flaws, were the chief reason for removing this option. And later, gave a consolation gift which now means that A could now see those updates of B, which does not begin with @C. eg.  wondering what @C is smoking. To me, that solves the problem, because its just a format change in a way. And who knows, maybe users will take more initiative in helping connect people now – a human touch to serendipity. Or more power to ‘recommended users’. Meanwhile, there are at least five of us who can have the pun fests we enjoy, because (only) we all follow a particular id we created only for this. So I’m sure users will figure their lives out without the option. 🙂

    Like Twitter, I too learned a few lessons from this entire exercise. That it is important to be transparent and communicate your complete perspectives, especially if you exist largely because of the community’s efforts. There might be disagreements, but its better to make your stand and reasons clear before the event. That it’s very easy for users to lose the perspective that Twitter is a free service that was never meant to be scaled so much, and a lot of what they’re doing now could be to ensure they can scale up. I’m quite glad that even unbridled mobs have  limits of ‘justice’ they can get. That it’s still an ecosystem about which very few (if any) people have a  clear long term objective about – on one side we complain about noise, and when Twitter removes an option that in many ways added to the noise, we complain about that too. That hashtags are increasingly becoming an end to themselves than a means. That it’s the real time issues that matter – most users wouldn’t know that its quite a difficult task (if not impossible) to get their first tweet, after they cross tweet # 3200.  Another example of how Twitter is so many different things to different people.

    until next time, “And I will cut you off from the peoples..”

  • Ends and beginnings

    Work took me someplace where I normally wouldn’t be found – an AOL (Art Of Living) discourse. While I have nothing against those who choose that path, I don’t see myself there. Standing there, as a non participant while a few thousand listened and performed yoga, I thought I got a few pointers to what made them a part of this movement. One was a feeling of belonging to a community that had the same wavelength and subscribed to the same thought processes and the other was a meaning, a purpose that the movement gave to their life.

    Since it was an official event, I got dropped back at home, and in the process got to do something that i rarely get to do – forget the road, the traffic and the world ahead and soak in the effect of humanity passing by. I don’t know if you enjoy what could be uncharitably labelled gawking, but if you pause and consider that each face, and each expression contains a story, maybe you’d enjoy it like you do.

    I passed Resthouse Road on the way, and saw Pecos and Guzzler’s Inn, not places I frequent, but places that are ‘tagged’ in my memories of Bangalore from the time I came here. As i proceeded down Brigade Road, i also saw the signage of Vaayu, a lounge bar, and thought I could see a difference in the crowd that each catered to. I realised that after a while, after a few generations had passed, Bangalore’s character most likely wouldn’t include Pecos, although we would, in our denial of mortality, not think of it that way now.

    I reached home, and after the obligatory channel flipping settled down to Rocky Balboa, the comfort of a ‘seen before many times’ movie that will let your thoughts drift and you still wouldn’t feel left out. I never thought I’d quote from a Rocky movie, but it seemed to fit in

    Ya know they always say if you live in one place long enough, you are that place.

    It stuck to me when I watched Delhi 6 the next evening. An old woman comes back to her country-city-locality to die in peace, in a place that she’s familiar and comfortable with, and finds that the place has remained unchanged, but the people haven’t. And it took me back to this post that I had written a while back – on Cochin and the cosmopolitan place it was becoming.

    So, where will I be comfortable finally – Bangalore, where I have now spent 6 years (almost to the day) and where I will (at some point in time) have lived long enough to ‘be the place’, Cochin, which I refuse to let go of, whose memories I guard like a treasure- the chaotic, humid, gets-on-your-nerves place that I consider my home, or someplace new that the cosmos has in store for me. A place which gives me a sense of belonging. A set of people who matter to me and who I matter to. And that’s where this stream of consciousness ends.

    The cosmos is listening. From the list of 143 songs in the list, on ‘shuffle’ mode, it has suddenly chosen Daughtry’s Home.

    until next time, are we on the same home page? 🙂