The Quintessential Outsider

It’s too hot out here in Chennai, and there’s not much I can do alone. So I have decided that I’ll leave for another trip to meet my friends and cousins. (Actually, this trip was planned well in advance )

I’ll be back in about 15 days, hopefully with some nice photos and experiences to share on this blog. Till then, good bye, although I shall be logging in occasionally to reply to comments, etc.

Btw, who do you think will win the IPL?

Ok, so I am back after another month-long hiatus. And I guess this will remain the frequency of my blog posts for a few more months. But for my enthusiastic readers (if there are any), I shall put a link on my Orkut profile and YM status whenever I update my blog.

Anyway, so coming to the point… I was talking to this friend yesterday about how I dislike debates or arguments on e-groups (Yahoo, Google, whatever). I do like to chat and debate a lot, through IM, though. I also like to read blogs (and the comments on them), and write on my own once in a while. On the other hand, I dislike (and usually ignore) the comments section on any ‘popular’ and otherwise ‘respectable’ site, e.g. IMDb, Youtube, any of the news sites, or any topic-based Orkut community for that matter. So, I thought… Is there a pattern to my likes and dislikes?

Well, what I basically dislike in the first and last examples is the usual lack of civility in discussion, and the inability of those responsible to even acknowledge it. And I like blogs and IM conversations for the same civility which I, and I think a lot of people, attach importance to. And I think these differences in the nature of discussions have something to do with the intrinsic nature of each of these online media.

The simplest to see is of course, IM. If you cannot have a healthy discussion, you probably will not have one at all, because both persons have the choice to just close the window, sign out, or ignore and block the other one. So, it is the joint responsibility of both the sides to maintain order.

On an e-group, it is not so simple. Even though you might be responding to a statement by a particular person, you actually write for everyone in the group to read. You can ‘reply’ to a person you might otherwise not talk to, or see eye-to-eye with, with oblique or sarcastic comments for ‘public consumption’. If there are even a few people who agree with you, you cannot be banned and your posts cannot be censored or moderated. Or you can be really loud and arrogant, if that threat does not exist at all.

The same goes for any ‘popular’ site where you are allowed to post comments. While downright abuses might not be approved, a lot of ’snide remarks’ and ‘offensive comments’ make the cut, and appear in any discussion, often distracting attention from the main issue. Firstly, the site owners/moderators have little time to read and understand all of them, and secondly, they cannot afford to lose ‘objectivity’ by ‘taking action’ against any particular ‘views’, however twisted they might be. (If you don’t have any views and just use ‘f**k’ a hundred times in a sentence, then it is a different matter altogether)

So how are blogs different? Well, the space is ‘owned’ by one particular person, who has the final say on what to do with the comments. You can afford to be a complete dictator in this regard and get away with it (unless you have Google Ads on your page and are worried about the readership ). If someone does not agree with you, they can just go set up their own blog where they can flame you all they like. If you are right and they are wrong, people will ignore them anyway, so why worry?

This can also be used to explain why some people act the way they do on news-channel debates, for example. If they are given a platform to provide soundbytes for ‘public consumption’, and that platform actually ‘needs’ them for its own sake, then they can afford to misbehave all they want. On the other hand, if they are standing in a court, which has been given the authority to ‘throw them out’ if need be, they will behave better.

Blogs are slightly different, though, because those who are thrown out also have the option of founding their own private kingdom, and indulging themselves, so it is not as authoritarian as the real-world analogue.

But wait… don’t we have a problem here? Doesn’t that mean that all (or most) blogs just have a cluster of like-minded readership? In the real world, if these clusters choose not to interact with each other because they dislike the ‘flaming’, then they can just sit in their own cocoons, harden their ideas and act on them, until the point that conflict becomes inevitable. So, the prevention of chaos and a preference for ‘order’ eventually leads to a violent eruption.

So, in the end, do you prefer constant chaos, but with a plurality of ideas, and freedom for everyone, or a semblance of order and civility, with dissent growing underneath? The first option might now seem the better one, but a question remains: What to do with the ‘loud’ and ‘arrogant’ ones? The answer: Just ignore them. For anyone who talks like Hitler or Mussolini all the time, there is no greater fear than being ignored and rendered irrelevant, not even the fear of being martyred (it attracts them all the more, if anything).

Random thoughts, and the analogues are stretched, but worth thinking about once in a while, isn’t it?

…that keeps amazing me even now, more than two years after joining it. First it was just a nice way to keep in touch with existing friends and meet new ones, then we saw how and why it is better than other similar ‘networking’ sites, then there were the discoveries like how to find out which of your friends have most recently signed in, how the crush-list feature works, then the profile views, better ways of searching for people and communities, of organizing your friends list, and of course, coming across long-lost friends. It keeps getting better – we now have a faster and easier way of replying to scraps (which existed in Firefox earlier, and has now been introduced in IE).

And now, I have come across another ‘fun-fact’ . How do you find out when did someone join Orkut? Well, you can check their scrapbook, but what if they have been deleting their scraps? (I know a lot of people like that) I think there’s no way of finding out the exact date, but there is, as I found out, a very precise way of comparing, say between two persons, who joined Orkut earlier.

No, I am not that ‘lukkha’, to sit and try to discover weird things about Orkut, or anything else for that matter. However, I noticed that whenever I tried to save my display pic, or a pic from my album, I would get a number, the same number every time, for any pic from my album, ‘593364.jpg’. I knew this for a long time, but never gave much thought to it. However, recently, I came across a few nice pics in some friends’ albums, and I saw that these numbers were revealing a pattern – the later someone has joined Orkut, the larger is the number associated with their pics.

It was easy to ignore this earlier, as the numbers could be dismissed as some random six- or seven-digit crap. However, with the number of Orkut users crossing 30 million now, it is easy to distinguish between those who have been on Orkut since 2004 (with six-digit ‘user numbers’, if I can call them that), and those who have joined recently (with 8-digit numbers).

So now, if you come across the profile of a certain Orkut Büyükkökten claiming to be the founder of Orkut, you have an easy way to verify it . Meanwhile, here’s a task for the real ‘lukkhas’ – find out the first person to ‘join Orkut’! You can begin with my ‘user number’, 593364, and work backwards. In fact, you will find a lot of people in my friends list with lower six-digit numbers. I am yet to see someone with five digits or fewer, though. Progress can be reported by commenting here, or in my scrapbook .

There are a few ‘catches’, though. What about those who never uploaded any pic on their profile? What about those who deleted their profiles? Did their numbers get ‘allotted’ to someone else? Well, I do not know, and have no clue how to find out. Maybe someone more knowledgable, or more ‘lukkha’, or working for Google, can help.

Meanwhile, here’s wishing all of you a very Happy Diwali! Enjoy yourself, but please try to do it with more light, than smoke and noise!

I am in a very peculiar situation today. I am thinking a lot about a lot of things, but I am not really in the mood to write too much. I had put up some links yesterday about the Israel-Lebanon conflict, and I have some things to say to both ‘camps’ who are trying to prove that the ‘others’ are lunatics, but if I start talking about all that right now, it will just take too long. I guess I will just stick to lighter stuff.

My blog is nearing its first birthday, though most of that year was spent in an inactive state on Blogspot. In the last few weeks since I have moved to WordPress, I have been playing around with the appearance of my blog almost everytime that I have logged in to write, but I guess I shall finally settle (at least for a while) with the current ‘Moon’ theme. It obviously looks good, but I also think it goes very well with the title of my blog (if you disagree, please leave a comment ).

As for the Moon’s beauty, we all know it looks that way only from a distance, for those who went there (assuming the ‘conspiracy theory’ is wrong) found it anything but beautiful. That is not surprising, if we keep in mind that old adage (I forgot exactly what it is). That has not stopped people, however, from paying rich tributes to the Moon, through poetry and music, among other things.

I recently heard some Hindi film songs about the Moon on an episode of ‘Sa Re Ga Ma Pa’ (No, I do not watch it regularly otherwise). They are currently airing a series with only child singers, and that particular episode had some ‘Moon’ theme. All the kids are really amazing, especially for their age. The worst part of the whole thing, however, is that they eliminate just one kid every time. I think it must be really tough for a kid to be the only one to be thrown out while, say, 10 others get in. But that’s the way these stupid ‘contests’ function, trying to make the most out of commodifying each and every possible human emotion. And they say they make dreams come true.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough for an ‘unplanned’ post. I shall be back to ‘arguing’ soon.

Welcome to the new home of The Quintessential Outsider. For many days and from many sources, I had heard that WordPress is better than Blogger. I created a login, had a look at the features, and Voila! Within minutes, I had shifted base, complete with all previous possessions. Hope this new space inspires me to write more often.

Meanwhile, a passing thought: I do not travel regularly on the Western suburban line. But I did use it, this Monday and last Friday. When I got on the train this morning, I casually looked around at the upper shelves. Paranoia? Well, lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice!