A few days ago I decided to try out twitter and came across an interesting post by Josh Kopelman titled Some new thoughts on the Atomization of Conversation. Here is a part of the post
On Sunday morning, our seven-year old daughter awoke with sharp pain in the lower right-hand corner of her stomach. Fearing appendicitis, we took her to the hospital, and they operated. I canceled my calls and meetings and basically disconnected from the Internet for the week. The only hint I gave was a brief Twitter message. My wife also cleared her calendar — but she provided some Facebook updates about the situation.â€
And what happened next really amazed me. Her phone started ringing with calls of support and help. Friends offered to pick-up and drop-off our son at school. Home-cooked dinners arrived at our house. Balloons, stuffed animals, and cards arrived at the hospital room. Old friends from high school and college called her saying that they were there to listen if she wanted to vent or talk.
Her brief Facebook status update was all it took to activate her real-world support network. It was incredible.
It got me thinking that in India, this would happen pretty naturally without a tweet and it would be appreciated but not seen as incredible.
As I was mulling this over my wife got off the phone with her mother and told me a funny story. She said that her mother, who had been living in the same apartment complex for 20 years, took a rickshaw to the neighborhood market.
As she settled in, the rickshawalla asked her why she had never taken a rickshaw before. He then went on to ask about her daughter (my wife), who he knew was in America, about her son and his kids and expressed how bad he had felt when my father-in-law had passed away. This rickshawalla had been outside this building for years and years and knew everything that was going on even though they had never ever interacted.
I wonder if Facebook and Twitter is the answer to the atomization of american society and is India headed towards such atomization to be glued together by social networks? Or is all this redundant in societies which have plenty of “rickshawalla�
What do you folks think? Are the roles of social tools significantly different in different parts of the world?
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Very interesting. Good analogy.
twitter/facebook are reborn “group messaging” tools with deeply integrated delivery mediums (web, IM, txt, email) and integration with other messaging tools. The old era group messaging tools were silos and mostly e-mail driven which left the delivery to txt, IM out, hence the so-called atomization was also left out.
Regarding the adoption of such tools in India, we have to look at the consumption patterns of the “enablers” viz. connectivity (always on vs. on demand), productivity/utility (yeah, how much time you wanna sink in facebook), cost (you may be on facebook all the time but your ISP may be billing you!) and the societal adoption (eg. my parents do not use web and my brother only does SMS). These variables work in synchronicity in US for twitter, Facebook to a large population but that case may be different in India.
Would you throw a sheep, cow or a beer at your boss in India? Probably not, but, you may wanna send him virtual gulab jumans!
there is a scale thing to consider also, based on speed and distance … in any small town in america the scene you describe would also happen, just as it does in small town tamil nadu. the difference in america for sometime now is, cars, and speed, and now you know all the details about a bookstore owner tenty miles away, a coffe shop crowd ten miles the other way, etc … it is the same thing, as the auto driver and your mother, just spread out
and twitter, well, i just came back from an airtel broadband office in bangalore, it was packed … (incidentally, to be able to access my broadband account in order to see my bandwidth consumption, i need to fill out another form and provide a picture and id, same stuff as when i got the account, then i will be able to look at my own details … if you doubt me, i have a digital recording to show you) … and twitter won’t be far behind
but one might suggest that some corporate mindsets might have to change
http://www.twitter.com/gregorylent
This is such a true observation. Social tools should definitely be different for India, but I’ve seen them be very similar to the ones in US.