I googled the letter 'F', the top result was Facebook.
I googled the letter 'G', the top result was GMail.
I googled the letter 'I', the top result was iGoogle.
I googled the letter 'T', the top result was a Twitter account.
In the near future, I'll google 'Me', and find myself stacked up on a white wall with Hex flowing all over.
Do you believe in ‘Fate’? Do you believe that your life is pretty much pre-defined and that you’re only toeing invisible fate lines; that your thought process is remote-controlled by the constellations, and all your decisions in life are all dictated by the guy upstairs. Unless you’re too conservative in your religious beliefs, you sure will debunk this as a hypothesis and move on. True! In this neo-liberal age, life has become easier that we are confident on our personal and professional choices - we feel we own our lives more than ever. We couldn’t be more right - the last century has advanced human life to such a degree that all that we did in prior 50,000 years seem minuscule. What 20th century achieved, the 21st seems all set to overtake already. The last decade has brought about what can only be termed as the next stage of human evolution - our seventh sense, though factitious, is activated. Welcome to the Social World, where news travels faster than light; wars are broad-casted live into your homes; governments are overthrown online, and all of us are ‘on’ anywhere, anytime.
Harry Potter’s magic wand has transformed into trendy gizmos, and his invisible cloak into Internet cloud; that makes all of us - empowered super-powered. Now Ullagam Nam Kaiyil; and thanks to social media, the Dark Lord of seclusion is vanquished for ever. As cool and propitious this may sound, once Gollum (our innocuous gadgets) is corrupted by the One Ring (Overreaching Social Media), Frodo (you) is not in safe waters. Ok! Enough of Hollywood similes - let me cut the crap and get down to business.
Social Media is redefining Fate.
pause for a moment and read again.
Social Media is redefining Fate.
Let me start with a case study. Starbucks is working on a business analytics model that will streamline its retail business. Which company doesn’t these days!! However, what interested me in their model is the parameters used for their forecasting - they include weather, time of the day, local significance, geography, demographics, etc. So, in lay terms, given a particular hour, the system can forecast how many cups of coffee would be sold at a particular joint based on past behavior, at some reasonable degree of precision. Throw in a customer’s membership or card number - we have a history of his past behavior and also a prediction of his future coffee drinking pattern. Chart technical analysts employ similar tactics to predict scribe movements in stock markets.
If we interpolate this to the social media layer, what can be mapped is more than just a cup of coffee - it’s our entire social image. People share their musings, personal updates, their coterie, where and whom they are with, dinner plans, (some even their hook-ups and break-ups) and lot more on social network. Some sites even probe your neurons directly with questions like - WHAT ARE YOU THINKING NOW? Jeez, stop being Mom!!!!
As long as our social identities are real (which Facebook and G+ are falling head over toes to enforce), we have our entire social behavior mapped against our timelines. Soon, we’ll have “behavior analytical systems” which can connect the dots on our timeline updates, and then forecast, with reasonable accuracy, our possible future behavior - or to put tacitly, you would be behaving as per the system forecasts you to. It can define what you want to see; and decide what you want to do. Sounds like fiction? So did tele-vision a century ago!
The more personal we get on social networks, the more we leave behind - not just our social footprints - but a sample of our behaviors, our moods, our habits, our identity. These can be ‘collaged’ to build our psyche; and then, behavioral tools would plot a digital identity of us, let our identity play itself in the ground against our social networks and circles, and determine our next behavior. Matrix anybody?!
Coming back to where we started - Do you believe in Fate?
I googled the letter 'G', the top result was GMail.
I googled the letter 'I', the top result was iGoogle.
I googled the letter 'T', the top result was a Twitter account.
In the near future, I'll google 'Me', and find myself stacked up on a white wall with Hex flowing all over.
Do you believe in ‘Fate’? Do you believe that your life is pretty much pre-defined and that you’re only toeing invisible fate lines; that your thought process is remote-controlled by the constellations, and all your decisions in life are all dictated by the guy upstairs. Unless you’re too conservative in your religious beliefs, you sure will debunk this as a hypothesis and move on. True! In this neo-liberal age, life has become easier that we are confident on our personal and professional choices - we feel we own our lives more than ever. We couldn’t be more right - the last century has advanced human life to such a degree that all that we did in prior 50,000 years seem minuscule. What 20th century achieved, the 21st seems all set to overtake already. The last decade has brought about what can only be termed as the next stage of human evolution - our seventh sense, though factitious, is activated. Welcome to the Social World, where news travels faster than light; wars are broad-casted live into your homes; governments are overthrown online, and all of us are ‘on’ anywhere, anytime.
Harry Potter’s magic wand has transformed into trendy gizmos, and his invisible cloak into Internet cloud; that makes all of us - empowered super-powered. Now Ullagam Nam Kaiyil; and thanks to social media, the Dark Lord of seclusion is vanquished for ever. As cool and propitious this may sound, once Gollum (our innocuous gadgets) is corrupted by the One Ring (Overreaching Social Media), Frodo (you) is not in safe waters. Ok! Enough of Hollywood similes - let me cut the crap and get down to business.
Social Media is redefining Fate.
pause for a moment and read again.
Social Media is redefining Fate.
Let me start with a case study. Starbucks is working on a business analytics model that will streamline its retail business. Which company doesn’t these days!! However, what interested me in their model is the parameters used for their forecasting - they include weather, time of the day, local significance, geography, demographics, etc. So, in lay terms, given a particular hour, the system can forecast how many cups of coffee would be sold at a particular joint based on past behavior, at some reasonable degree of precision. Throw in a customer’s membership or card number - we have a history of his past behavior and also a prediction of his future coffee drinking pattern. Chart technical analysts employ similar tactics to predict scribe movements in stock markets.
If we interpolate this to the social media layer, what can be mapped is more than just a cup of coffee - it’s our entire social image. People share their musings, personal updates, their coterie, where and whom they are with, dinner plans, (some even their hook-ups and break-ups) and lot more on social network. Some sites even probe your neurons directly with questions like - WHAT ARE YOU THINKING NOW? Jeez, stop being Mom!!!!
As long as our social identities are real (which Facebook and G+ are falling head over toes to enforce), we have our entire social behavior mapped against our timelines. Soon, we’ll have “behavior analytical systems” which can connect the dots on our timeline updates, and then forecast, with reasonable accuracy, our possible future behavior - or to put tacitly, you would be behaving as per the system forecasts you to. It can define what you want to see; and decide what you want to do. Sounds like fiction? So did tele-vision a century ago!
The more personal we get on social networks, the more we leave behind - not just our social footprints - but a sample of our behaviors, our moods, our habits, our identity. These can be ‘collaged’ to build our psyche; and then, behavioral tools would plot a digital identity of us, let our identity play itself in the ground against our social networks and circles, and determine our next behavior. Matrix anybody?!
Coming back to where we started - Do you believe in Fate?
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