Mousetrap - Beyond Television

Arunabha Sengupta

A child hunting for a mouse behind the television is a picture poignantly painted in Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, and recounted in our editorial as a symbolic snapshot of the modern world.

The age of passively consuming material prepared – and often carefully edited sticking to the need to know basis – by arbitrary aristocracy of the media is passé.  Television and press, predominant pillars of our social consciousness and substance, are currently struggling against the rising tide of cyber swarm buzzing about in the social media. Today’s individual is not content with the opinion of a select few who by virtue and accident of their position and profession have become self proclaimed information elites. Everyone today wants to have a voice, and that voice wants to be, if not heard, within hearing range of all. And these voices can throw themselves against the noise of journalism to challenge the degree of hollowness that previously passed unmeasured.

While the global phenomenon of a collaborative news sharing, social debates and communication is self evident through numerous websites, blogospheres, social networks and knowledge tools, some of the factors involved in the current change may seem counter-intuitive.

A lot of the social capital that is leveraged through websites such as Wikipedia, You Tube and also FaceBook are results of purely voluntary investment of personal time and effort. In rare, numerically insignificant cases, are they balanced by financial benefit. Most of the contribution is generated beyond working hours by people otherwise fully employed.

The obvious question is why do they take all this trouble? Why click away to exhaustion neither for gold nor glory? How does one manage the time to upload knowledge nuggets on Wikipedia or videos on YouTube or commentary on journalistic blogs after a full day and a half of energy sapping work at his primary trade?

For all of us who grew up in the second half of the twentieth century - with its presupposed television box in the corner, newspaper on the porch and the stereotypical economic thought of material benefit in the mind, this is indeed a paradigm shift difficult to comprehend.

Modern economics is heavily pre-biased about how every man works for his own self interest – the last couple of words directly translated into financial gain. Much of the economic turmoil of recent times may have been the result of this myopic understanding of human motivation, but that is the subject matter of a different discussion. When Adam Smith first laid down his theory, self interest was not limited to monetary profits but encroached and encompassed psychological aspects as well. It consisted of whatever made the individual feel enriched. Whatever led to his feeling of wellbeing.

Much of the last century was spent by man creating an island around himself that was primarily centred around his work, linked only to a few friends and colleagues, while weakly joined to the bigger world through the mass media of print and television. The epochal ‘accident’ of the dominance of print and telecommunication technology ensured this consumerist behaviour, aided and abetted by the ivory towers that were built around the upper echelons of these industries.

However, by nature man is known to be a social animal – and hence contributing to his parent group is one of his basic characteristics. With this new technological marvel of the internet, followed by the plethora of social networking applications cropping up, he has rediscovered a route to reconnect. The desire to form groups of likeminded individuals - to communicate with and exchange ideas, thoughts and labours of love actively - is fast winning through. His social self is coming to the fore yet again, while the sense of well being that comes from belonging with other resonating souls, mutually making lives meaningful are more than compensating for the economic benefits that such an arrangement lacks.

As far as time investment is concerned, one needs only to look at the hours spent by the previous generations in watching reality shows, sitcoms and professional wrestling. While television-conditioned addicts seldom enquire about the colossal man-years spent in following the lives of Big Brother participants, this perspective can shine a illuminating light in the search for lost time, today redistributed in the more involved brand of entertainment called social engineering.

However, does it compromise quality? Populist participation that breaks the barricades of elitist embargoes?

Robert McHenry, former editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, has gone on record likening Wikipedia to a public rest room. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft has denounced the shared production of open source software by invoking comparisons with something he feels is a swear word – communism. Andrew Kern, author of The Cult of the Amateur, drew parallels between bloggers and monkeys.  

Although loudly echoing vested interests, these concerns ask a common and important question. Can shared, unmanaged work, while fine for picnics, compete with serious labour carried out for money, directed by managers and conducted by organisations?

Let us look at one example.

Recently, a national newspaper of India published an article about the government banning deodorant commercials. Slightly off beat, it might have passed as a regular news item if vigilant netizens had not detected that it was a copy and paste job from a site named – quite indicatively – FakeNews.com. By virtue of its name and mission statement, FakeNews is a sparkling media-parody site, that publishes false bulletins to generate some hard hitting and some purely side splitting satires. This prestigious Indian daily had ripped off one such article. And due to the collaborative effect of the modern cyber-world, the story was soon picked up and published in a major UK based world news site, the classical media men still blissfully unaware of the faux pas.

The question that rises from this is whether this is a recent phenomenon, or lousy journalism of this sort has existed throughout history and is being unearthed today because of the heavily networked world?

Moving to a much weightier issue, the power of social media was realised recently when citizen journalists posted and tweeted reports, photos and videos of the disaster in Japan – thus producing text and footage which would never have made past the higher echelons of editorial desk.

In such contexts, individual contribution to world news and information is not only a productive pastime adding to a sense of social well being, but also a way of regulating half truths to make the world whole, to clean up the monopolistic complacence that has obviously crept into decadent establishments.

With the social radius having become infinite thanks to the web based tools and applications, which are simple enough for even the non-technical public force to contribute, the scope of social organisation, engineering and product is immense. Whatever in previous generations seemed limited because of groups of limited number of people working for a cause with personal constraints, has now been multiplied by infinity that comes with global connectedness. Unfinished work by a Chinese blogger can now be completed by someone from Alaska. All this makes us believe that such clean ups and an absolute change of the social dynamics is very much on the cards, in fact, being etched on them at this moment.

Wikipedia is a sterling example of such social engineering. An immense product created independent of centralised control, by individuals nameless and faceless, often identified only by a series of unremarkable dots and numbers of their IP Address.

And this makes optimistic political soothsayers grasp at the power of social connections as a panacea.

However, while so promising in terms of collaborative knowledge compilation, is social engineering also equally adaptive to the world of revolutions and overthrow of dictators as many would lead us to believe?

Several articles in this issue deal with this rather difficult question. 


Arunabha Sengupta is the co-editor of Scroll and the author of three novels, the latest being The Best Seller

Mauled by walls! - A review of Social Network the movie

Aisoorya Vijayakumar

The lives of the young, the successful, and the aspiring, more often than not, have been chronicled in newspapers, television, and these days, social networking sites. People draw inspirations from these endowed souls and try emulating them, or at least try singing their glories. The accomplishments of these young achievers get as much prominence as their hideous and heinous acts of venom and revenge. Recall the stories of child prodigies and teenage entrepreneurs that you might have stumbled upon or come across and followed – be it stories of kids turned dazzling millionaires or simpler people who made it big by starting out on a smaller pursuit of making an extra buck.

Directed by David Fincher and written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network, based on The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, is one such tale – a tale of conflicting ambitions, seeking strength from misgivings, a tale of Facebook, the most popular social networking site of our times, a tale of betrayed trust and faltered friendship. It maps out the lives of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) – a genius kid who sets out to storm the world with his ideas on networking, Eduardo  Saverin (Andrew Garfield) – a svelte man of the world who has immense faith in his brainy friend’s mind-maps and decides to invest in his friend’s fledgling project, the Winklevoss twins(Armie Hammer) – full of righteous indignation and resentful bitterness at what to them is as an underhand blow by Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) – of loose morals and  - yet, or therefore - self-assured. This motion picture also brings to the fore how society succumbs to sensationalism and struggles not to be left behind – the urge to “belong”that skulks within us.

There are varyingly intense debates on how accurate The Social Network is in bringing out the truth, but as Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin said of the film, "[...] the movie was clearly intended to be entertainment and not a fact-based documentary.”

The storyline seems innocuous to begin with. Harvard nerd Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) dumps him. In retaliation he resorts to a nasty blogpost on her, in the process coming up with Facemash, a rating site that lets guys compare and rate girl students across the campus. This development is so predictably lurid that it catches on like wild fire. Before they realize it, Zuckerberg and his battalion of 3 have crashed Harvard’s servers. It is a mixed bag for the hero. Though he is served a 6-month academic probation notice, he also ends up impressing the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella). The latter three have been thinking about creating a Harvard-exclusive dating site called The Harvard Connection and they express their interests in using Zuckerberg’s programming expertise, in the process getting his verbal consent.
Zuckerberg meanwhile is coding The Facebook, a student-level social networking site, and gets funded by Saverin. He lets the Winklevosses and Narendra nurture hopes that the whizkid will soon start working on their site.
When Zuckerberg launches The Facebook, outrage follows, with the twins and Narendra convinced that he stole their concepts, leading to a decision to sue him together.
Zuckerberg meanwhile draws warmth from the seemingly frivolous Sean Parker, who, the movie claims, founded Napster, the music site that bombed out the record industry. Zuckerberg finds himself increasingly relating to Parker’s ideologies.
Parker’s helps Zuckerberg in many ways, from convincing him to drop the “The” from “Facebook” to fishing and hooking investors into the Facebook project.

This leads to an ugly turn of events with Saverin remaining skeptical about Parker’s character and callousness. When Zuckerberg orders him to move to Palo Alto, CA, so that he is “not left behind,” the warning so haunts him that he freezes the company accounts. Saverin labors tirelessly to pitch for advertising revenues for Facebook and to his horror learns that his shares in the company have been unfairly diluted to make room for new investors. He duly challenges Zuckerberg to a lawsuit. So, the creator of the Social Networking phenomenon goes through two lawsuits and settlements. At the end of it all,he is  left spending another evening by himself, his friend catching tool of little help in getting over his loneliness.

Characterization is a big positive for the movie.
Fincher and Sorkin seem to be masters at creating cold and ruthless characters and they are highly effective in that the characters do not try eliciting your sympathy or empathy. 
Zuckerberg is the beacon of this clammed-up clan in the movie, and his obsession and short attentive spans make us believe that he is suffering from a mild variant of Asperger’s syndrome  – he is remarkably expressive when situation demands, and disdainful and icy at other times. His razor-sharp wit and split-second decision-making are bizarrely admirable. 
Eisenberg nails the role with ease and elegance – restless eyes, appalling wardrobe, and a scathing tongue, he has played the ominous scenes so well so that you cannot help itching to smack him on the head for being such a creep. 
Saverin is perhaps the only human-side character in this disarray. Garfield, as Saverin, is endearing, with his helpless concern when he tells Facebook lawyers that Zuckerberg is usually careless about money, and needs to be looked after, and when with child-like astonishment when he tells Zuckerberg in the courtroom, “I was your only friend!” Gleamy-eyed Timberlake portrays Parker with his spontaneous humor and menacing villainy rolled into a bundle, and deserves kudos for the portrayal. The Winklevoss twins, embodied by Hammer, are surprisingly impactful. They, contrary to usual dogma that rich kids always bully nerds, consider themselves as the victims of a master manipulation by a nerdy geek. When realizing that they would find no support in Summer, the Harvard President, they show their spite very ably.

Aaron Sorkin’scriss-cross screenplay is riveting. Court-room to campus, motives to consequences, slights to anguish and distress, Sorkin covers it all. Dialogues are memorable for the most part and keep viewers engaged. Sandwiching emotions with ironies, the straight with the crooked,Fincher and Sorkin pack this gripping tale with coats of artful paradoxes which hold true in life as well. As the whole world gets smaller, brought to the monitor, as communications gets cheaper and simpler, individuals start getting rated on how others perceive them socially. How the number of friends one has on his or her list determines worth and success, how trivial gestures of acknowledgements – “liking” a picture, a wallpost, a comment – have taken up mammoth importance in the way people value relationships, the “wall, don’t call” phenomenon where age-old habits of catching up with friends have been assigned new dimensions.

As the movie ends, Zuckerberg sends his ex-girlfriend Erica a friend request on Facebook and refreshes his screen every few seconds to check for a response from her. We, like Zuckerberg, can’t help wondering if the future is as bleak to the rest of us as it is to him – lonely evenings of coffee and the computer, a million people to “like” what you say on Facebook but not a soul to listen to you.

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With diagonally opposite life trajectories vis-a-vis a masters in biotechnology and a career in technical communications, Aisoorya revels in being able to put down in words all that her mind registers. Forgetful beyond redemption and a hopeless insomniac, her blog world avatar is named "the Coffee Bean," inspired from the 'The egg, the carrot, and the coffee bean" story. She scribbles down her musings in her blog.