One look at my few hundred friends/followers on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and my blog tells me that I’m a fairly sociable person. That I make friends fairly easily; and that I keep in touch with my friends and followers fairly regularly. Yet, in real life, I’m a somewhat private person. I keep a low profile and am uncomfortable in large groups. I find it difficult to mingle in parties and tend to avoid them. So much so that friends have stopped inviting me to their parties and get-togethers altogether.

If I were to count the number of friends I’m in touch with every month in the real world, it’ll probably add up to 20 – on the outside, 30 persons. On the social media channels I use almost every day, that figure is 5 times as much – or more. And, although I have many friends and followers on social media, I can’t think of a single friend who is keeping a tab on me in real life on a daily basis (maybe except office colleagues).

When I dig a little deeper and analyse my participation on social media, I find that I’m fairly ‘active’, posting on Facebook and tweeting every day. I even manage to blog thrice a week. Linkedin and Pinterest are relegated to once a week, maybe less. In real life, conversations with friends (barring a few) start with “Hey, let’s catch up. It’s been ages since we spoke to each other.” Meaning, my real-world contacts with friends aren’t anywhere near the activity levels that my social media involvement suggests.

[Photo credit: www.idiva.com]

However, it’s true that I love talking and usually have long conversations with friends over lunch/dinner or coffee when we meet – or over phone. Moreover, according to friends and colleagues, I have strong views. I’m considered to be opinionated, argumentative, and even judgemental. Yet, I find that I have nothing much to say on any of the social media channels I use.

Most of my Facebook/blog posts and tweets are uploads of photos (photography being a hobby I enjoy spending time alone) with short descriptions, or links to stories/articles/music videos I’ve found online. What I mean to say is that, unlike my real-life self offline, I hardly ever express a strong or negative personal point of view on social media, preferring to stay amiable and on neutral ground, clicking ‘likes’ every now and then.

My photo uploads almost always get likes and comments, and are generally well-appreciated by friends and followers as a means of communication. My writing – i.e. poems, thoughts and short fiction – usually goes unnoticed on the internet. Contrary to this, in the real world, I’m more comfortable with words as a means of communication and hardly ever use photos or pictures or diagrams to illustrate a point or make a statement (unless it’s a presentation for my clients at work).

So, here’s the question: how much of my life is fabricated on social media and how much of it is real? And the next: if nothing has been fabricated, which profile is the real me?

The interesting and perhaps perplexing part of this story is, I believe, my profile and behaviour on social media are both ‘real’ and ‘true’ in the sense that I am actually connected to a few hundred people through social media. And, we all actually follow each other on our Facebook news feeds or Twitter streams, and read each other’s blogs, and like each other’s updates/blog posts, and retweet each other’s tweets, and share each other’s posts, links and albums…

The internet, by virtue of being a vast common place for anyone who can access it (and more and more people are doing so everyday), is a universe which promotes this concept of openness – of freedom of speech and mutual respect. So, it’s probably true that the progress we (as the human race) make in the 21st century and beyond will depend to a large extent on our use and respect for the internet.

The greater the openness on the internet, the closer we are to the truth. The greater the censorship of the internet, the farther we travel from the truth. And yet, across the world, governments, religious institutions and businesses constantly exercise their power and influence to censor the internet and suppress our freedom of speech.

Photo credit: WSJ.net/public/resources/images

China and several Islamic governments in the Middle East and Africa have been notorious in this respect. But India, the world’s largest democracy, too has had her black days. For instance, in August last year, the Indian government clamped down on social media sites as it felt that content on these sites (particularly Twitter) fuelled communal violence in India’s North-East states.

More recently, last November, the arrest of two college students in India – and the vandalising of their uncle’s property – for their Facebook updates and ‘likes’ challenging the shutdown of Mumbai city after political party leader Bal Thackeray’s death led to an outcry for freedom of speech on the internet and the mass media. In this case, it was a regional political party which wielded its heavy hand over free speech.

On one hand, the internet and social media in particular encourage us to speak, be heard, share our ideas with others, and uphold the tenets of an open and democratic world. On the other, it falls prey to the same heavy-handedness of powerful entities which we have seen and experienced in an older offline world. Perhaps, one day, a world-wide civil justice system will balance the differences.

Of course, there are two clear differences we can count on thanks to the internet: one, we are more connected than we were before; and two, we can reach out to each other much faster than we were able to before. Although we have a long way to go, if we come together as one human race, there is hope for a more open and democratic world.

There was public outcry – in New Delhi and across India – and the Indian media ruled the universe for over two weeks (and it still continues), gathering public opinion, outcry and abuses – at times, passing judgements on lynching the gang of rapists as if it was the Wild West. Individually, some of us felt the same way.

No matter what our gender was, we wanted death for the rapists! Nothing else mattered.

Adding to our outrage was the insensitive attitude of, and action by, the Delhi Police against people who took to the streets demanding justice for the crime. The Police tried to disperse crowds of protestors with water-guns and tear-gas shells, arresting many of them and trying to bully them into making confessions at police stations.

[Photo credit: International Business Times www.ibtimes.com]

Soon, members of the mainline media began embracing social media, interweaving mainline media tactics with social media for greater public reach and response.

Many of those users of social media who normally stayed in the background and followed others silently broke their inertia and silence to chip in with support and personal opinion. They took to their desktops, laptops, iPads and mobilephones to post and tweet, respond and react, and share – sending ripples through the world wide web.

For, this gang-rape event and its consequences were too much of an outrage upon the human soul to remain silent any longer. The emotion was simply too high. Even those who were meek found a voice and were heard.

Essentially, being social means connecting with people. It means reaching out to others as much as it means embracing others when they reach out to us, including them in our lives. There’s nothing new in this. We’ve been doing it for tens of thousands of years, if not longer. In fact, being social has everything to do with being human – and is deeply rooted in our behaviour.

The internet, as much as telephones and various forms of transportation which came before it, makes it faster, easier, simpler and possible in a grander scale than ever before – thanks to advances in technology.

But the desire, and our efforts, to connect with others (at least one other person on this planet) and share our thoughts, feelings, experiences, creativity, achievements, possessions… are integral to our nature as human beings. We have always been that way. The more we have evolved as a human race, the greater has been our need to connect with each other. And this, in turn, has helped us evolve further.

[photo credit: i.telegraph.co.uk]

So today, the internet, along with digital technologies, mobile communications, social media and their applications – all of which help us connect, and stay connected, with each other – are really inseparable from human lives and human evolution. They are reflections of who we are. They make us what we are: i.e. social beings. What we choose to do with them is up to us.

In the new year, give this a thought: if being social means connecting and sharing with others, if it means seeing our lives reflected in others, isn’t it time we used the internet (and everything that comes it) with empathy? Isn’t it time we used it responsibly?

Diwali is the time of year in India when everyone becomes a fan of everyone else, liking and sharing with happy abandonment. A holiday is declared, and the whole country becomes one huge social network; or more correctly, millions of tiny communities (you could say ‘circles’) of family and friends within a huge social universe.

To put it simply, the essence of Facebook and Google Circles has been deeply embedded in the Indian social fabric for several thousand years. And Diwali, with its massive volume of conversations, interactions and engagement between people, is the perfect real-life representation of the modern-day social networking phenomenon.

But, what about brands and their marketers using social media today? Can Diwali help them create cohesive networks of fans and customers who will engage with their brands and the companies that market them?

Although this remains a challenge to the best of brands and their marketers, Diwali does throw some light on it.

First, to drive brand/company engagement, a brand/company needs a community of fans and customers. Since the very essence of Diwali is community building by bringing people together, Diwali offers a ready-made platform upon which brands/companies can easily create their own fan/customer communities.

Second, during Diwali, bonds between people are strengthened, engendering trust and fellow-feeling. Friends and family members share good wishes and advice, passing on their wisdom and recommendations for their favourite products, services, brands and companies to others. If brands and companies truly believe that their fans and customers trust a message from a friend more than they trust a message directly from a brand or a company, then Diwali prepares the ground for such an event happening with more certainty.

Third, with everyone celebrating Diwali by buying something new for themselves and their homes, exchanging gifts with each other, and believing Diwali to be an auspicious time for investments, people are favourably disposed to buying products and services during Diwali. This automatically opens up a world of commerce for brands and their marketers.

So, if you’re in India, focus on building your fan/customer communities now. By next year’s Diwali, you would have covered some ground in doing business on social media.

What makes ‘search’ so fascinating – and complex at the same time – is the way we use search to find answers to our queries on/from the internet. Here are some typical search habits of Indian internet users:

For information in general, Google is our first choice. For instant news, Twitter has our answers. Looking for old friends? Facebook, of course. Professional connections? Log on to Linkedin. Pictures? Google Images. Music videos? YouTube. Research? Wikipedia. Restaurant reviews? Burrp or Zomato. Books and authors? Amazon or Flipkart. Info on movies? imdb.com. Travel info? Tripadvisor. Travel tickets? MakeMyTrip, ClearTrip, etc. Deals on gadgets? ebay, snapdeal, olx, etc.

Well, you get the picture: internet search has evolved over the years. Still, in its heart lies a simple concept (and responsibility): it must quickly and accurately answer a specific question that the user asks.

[Image Courtesy - Compete Pulse]

Whether Facebook launches its own search engine or not, one cannot deny the fact that Facebook is sitting on a gold mine of social data. Facebook is where we all are – no matter which search tools we use to find answers to our own questions. It’s on Facebook that we are congregating, connecting with each other, conversing about everything that interests us, and finding answers to many of our questions.

Since we are on Facebook, it’s where brands and advertisers are headed as well… with their advertising and marketing campaigns to charm us, engage us, sell us their goods and services, and convert us into their loyal customers.

However, it’s not Facebook alone which is keen to capitalise on its user experience of, and time spent on, the social networking site – though they have a distinct advantage over other search engines, portals and e-commerce sites with all the social data they are gathering from their users. This seems to be the business model that’s driving the entire internet.

The thing is, our time spent on the internet is generating a huge amount of data for the owners of the sites we visit and use. And, in turn, that’s providing a huge opportunity for the owners of those sites to apply their marketing and business strategies to generate revenues for themselves.

As we go about our business on the internet, internet companies search and monitor our behaviour to home in on us to sell their own, or their partners’, goods and services.

These are the first few lines from a seventies song by Brenda Lee, written by Dickey Lee and Allen Reynolds. And, though the singer and songwriters may have been talking about matters of our heart and our minds, today, in the age of the internet, these words are equally important to us.

[Courtesy - Small Biz Trends]

Needless to say, internet search takes up a lot of our time – whether we are conscious of it or not.

Interestingly, it is this ‘time’ that we spend on the internet that all internet companies and brand advertisers are after. Their agenda is to grab as much of our time on the internet as they can. That’s because, the more time we spend on a specific site, doing a specific task such as search for information or interact with people, the more attractive we make that site and/or search engine in the eyes of its prospective advertisers.

To the advertisers, the share of our ‘time’ on the internet means opportunities to talk to us and market their brands to us, with the hope that we will spend our money to buy their brands – either directly on the internet or through their retail channels.

The internet companies, therefore, act as the media and the marketplace where advertisers can buy time and space to showcase their brands and their advertising messages, providing them a much-needed opportunity for revenue and income generation.

In short, while we reach out for information or people to connect with on the internet, internet companies and advertisers reach out for us on the internet. Not just for our hearts and our minds as Brenda Lee sings to us, but for our time and our money as well.

The internet was this endless library in which I could spend days on end, in a daze, searching for information on whatever curiosity occupied my mind at a particular moment. From ancient history   to demons to literature to science to zoology, I searched and searched. I read and read. It was a latent desire that blossomed with the internet, and happily is still with me today.

It was only when I began subscribing to select information through newsletters (to be read later at leisure) that my email id became necessary and important. And, along with this, it became necessary and important for me to create my online persona. [Back then, very few of my friends and colleagues in India had email ids, so email exchanges were limited – though this scenario changed quickly in the next two years.]

I chose a unique name and remained semi-anonymous for a while, disclosing only those bits of information about myself which were mandatory. I say ‘semi-anonymous’ because, although I revealed only a little bit about myself, I did it truthfully and did not falsify information. This semi-anonymity ended with my craving for books on literary fiction and CDs of Blues/Rock music which I bought by the dozens from Amazon.com using my credit card, revealing my true self.

Yet, and I don’t know why this was so, a desire for online anonymity lurked inside my heart. So, when I began blogging in 2005, I created another unique name for myself and adopted it as a blogger. Soon, I was using it on Orkut and my semi-anonymity (all mandatory information was accurate and my photo was of my real self) became an enigma for my online friends and followers.

They knew what I looked like; and they could gauge a great deal about me from the information I had shared and from my updates and comments. But they were intrigued by my reluctance in not revealing my real name. They felt I was not true to them. This became a sort of game between us, with them trying to guess my true persona, while I continued to live this semi-anonymous life online.

However, it was with Linkedin that things changed seriously for me. On Linkedin, not only did I have to provide accurate verifiable information about myself, I realised that a single online persona based on my true self actually benefited me more than my earlier fragmented anonymous persona with online aliases. I realised real people look for real people to connect with, to make friends with, to follow, and to build their lives and careers with – online as well as in real life.

I realised that, when I reveal my true self to these real people, I engender trust, confidence, a sense of integrity and respect… which are the essential building-blocks of human relationships.

Some say that because we cannot fully control our facial muscles, the human face is an open book of truthfulness. Whatever a person is feeling and experiencing inside is most likely revealed/reflected on the person’s face.

There is also a saying that humans know how – or, at least, try – to mask their emotions. Suggesting that humans (know how to) control and modify their facial expressions in order to hide their true feelings and experiences. In other words, faces can lie.

The ‘management’ of our facial expressions is, no doubt, done by controlling our facial muscles. But the need for it is influenced by – and is a direct result of – our cultural, social and personal backgrounds and our ability to ‘manage’ our emotions. In short, our faces are reflections of our persona.

If these constructs – i.e. face reflecting truth/lie, face reflecting our persona – be true, I wonder how they influence, create, re-create and reflect our online persona in this digital/internet age. For instance, how true or real-life is our persona on our Facebook page?

[Image courtesy: SelfDevelopments.com]

It’s interesting to note that these social media sites use the term ‘profile’ as commonplace, thereby staying clear from the more-difficult term ‘persona’. Perhaps it’s because there’s a strong age-old connection between the words ‘face’ and ‘profile’. Perhaps, profiles are more about data which is easier to crunch and analyse than investigating matters of the mind.

Whatever it be, if we were to look deeply enough, we would find that our posts, updates, tweets, photos, videos, fans, follows, resumes, ratings, shares, keyword searches, comments, clicks… and all forms of online interactions and participation do reveal our online persona.

The reasons for this behaviour could be many: need, peer pressure, trends, just for the fun of it… and the list could go on. The amount and levels of communication that happen on these social media sites, so to speak, is unfathomable. In fact, there is much more to the communication, interactions and engagement that happen on social media.

It has become a sort of culture to express oneself on social media; and, to an extent, there is no harm in doing so. But, what happens when people express themselves openly and these expressions lead to bizarre and unexpected outcomes? Here is an interesting article, ‘Is Facebook Causing Divorce?’, which discusses such an unexpected outcome.

[Image courtesy: DailyBits.com]

Now, while some say and many feel that social media is a substitute for social life in the real world, it would be better if social media could reflect on one’s real life social qualities. For instance, if a divorce is happening on the basis of evidence given on Facebook, could this possibly mean that this evidence is merely a reflection of what’s happening in the real world?

In other words, is Facebook merely playing out what’s happening in reality… though the situation is being ignored by the people concerned?

And, what if a person is faking his or her social media presence? Could self-expressions of a fake identity be construed or accepted as real expressions? Could a real-life divorce be granted on display of such make-believe feelings and self-expressions from a fake identity?