Tag Archives: social media

e-Write e-Read, Reading, Social Media

How reading has become more social

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For the longest time, we were talking about how the internet was making us unsocial. Rather than socializing with our neighbours and “real” friends and family, we were running after people we hadn’t even met, talking to them, chatting and exchanging ideas neglecting our real social lives (if we had any).

Or if we had a roaring online life it was automatically assumed that we chose internet social as a kind of consolation prize to real social. People were afraid that spending a lot of time online would lead to depression and unsocial, even antisocial behaviour.

The clerk, one of the pilgrims in Chaucer's Ca...
The clerk, one of the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury tales (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Stereotypes of nerds have abounded in our social imagination a long time, of course. Think of Chaucer’s clerk in the Canterbury Tales with his threadbare overcoat, not speaking a word more than he could help, bent down with the weight of his twenty leather-bound books, a very rare handmade commodity back then. Continue reading How reading has become more social →

Blogging, Blogging Dilemmas, Most Commented, Uncategorized

Blogging: Quality vs. Quantity

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The challenge:

Have you ever scrolled through what seemed like a million blogs before you managed to come up with one that seemed worth reading? Have your various feeds been bombarded with numerous posts so that you have wondered if you needed to “unfollow” or “unfriend” someone while the whole time being aware of an uncomfortable feeling that you might be missing out on a few good posts by removing the blogger completely from your feed?

There are bloggers who post too much. We simply don’t feel like seeing them again. And there are bloggers who post too little. They get buried  in the avalanche of the prolific post-ers.

It’s not the blogger’s fault. My limited experience with blogging has revealed an inherent contradiction embedded in the very genre of the blog .
Continue reading Blogging: Quality vs. Quantity →

e-Write e-Read, Memories, Reading

Email and the Parents

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It was probably the year 2001 and I was checking my email in a computer lab in a school in Florida trying to concentrate amidst the loud noise that the dot matrix printers were making on the aisle (which were the only printers completely free for students then although laser ones did exist).

I was checking an email that had the following subject line:

INFORMATION RECEIVED. ACTION TAKEN.
Continue reading Email and the Parents →

Uncategorized

Writing blog introductions: Challenges

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I must confess that amongst different kinds of writings, the introduction to blogs have posed some very special challenges. A blogger has to achieve a myriad different goals and effects within those first few lines. Otherwise, s/he gets shoved into oblivion without a second glance. Or a second chance. Continue reading Writing blog introductions: Challenges →

Blog as Genre, Uncategorized

Blog, language and the global audience

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It was a rainy day yesterday. Gray sky as dark as slate, a gray river with boats in muted colours stuck solid on the gray, opaque water of the Hudson in the low light. The air smelt of wet vegetation. The balcony railing had drops of water clinging from it. I breathed in the fresh air  and I thought, ahhh, a muri, telebhaja kind of day.

Oh wait. I’ll have to translate that.

A puffed-rice and assorted-vegetables-dipped-in-batter and deep fried kind of day.

I smiled. Continue reading Blog, language and the global audience →

Blog as Genre, Freshly Pressed, Uncategorized

Sounds of the Blogosphere

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These are the records of the Earthling Bottledworder (henceforth to be referred to as EB in the third person) trapped in the spaceship Over-Enterprise for several months on its voyage to the Blogosphere.
Continue reading Sounds of the Blogosphere →

Reading

Why I don’t read literature in the global age

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njoy! 4get wastin tym @ lit class LOL!

I was looking to widen my horizons through reading literature recently and look what I found outside the book!

An animated world map
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A stretched world that’s already shrunk so small that I don’t know where to look to expand my mind anymore.

I saw people in Washington Square Park yesterday eating South Indian dosas wrapped like a Mexican burrito from a street vendor  and I read in the news that they got 3G on top of mount Everest at last.
Continue reading Why I don’t read literature in the global age →

Featured, Indian and Bengali, Memories, Social Media

Facebook, old photographs and memories

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Throughout the history of time there’s been Facebook. At first, in ancient societies, photographs were used in human social networking only to identify people. But evidence has been found that many denizens of those older cultures preferred other markers in the space for profile pictures to identify themselves  as a flower, a celebrity or a cartoon character that they thought represented them.

In the initial days of Facebook, people were scared of revealing themselves.

And then, a time came when everybody started sharing pictures. Those inhibitions started receding slowly, much like the slow ebbing of a wave on the beach.  Perhaps teenagers who are on Facebook nowadays can’t even remember those days.

But I can. I can remember that day on the beach.

That’s because an old photograph has resurfaced on Facebook.
Continue reading Facebook, old photographs and memories →

Uncategorized

Facebook, love, and fiction

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You are in love with this girl that you’ve been tracking for a while on Facebook. You may or may not have met her in person. You know what she likes, what she dislikes (or at least what she thinks she likes or dislikes), where she’s from, who her best friends are who regularly talk to her, where she went for a hike this weekend, even where she is right now, at this very moment.

Holding hands.

You know her like you’ve never known anyone before. Like from the inside of her head. You know her far better than your roommate that you eat and watch TV with everyday.

You know how her thoughts waver, how she is indecisive, how she sometimes posts a link and deletes it immediately, how she changes the wording on her status updates because she is rather shy and doesn’t want to appear too bold with sensational things.

There’s a dreamy quality about her that you like for she often makes the backgrounds of her pictures fuzzy keeping the focus only on herself and her friends who are always smiling, frozen in time. Continue reading Facebook, love, and fiction →

Blogging Dilemmas, Uncategorized

Writing my blog persona or brand

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Original cover artwork for the 2001 release

So for the past six weeks or so, I’ve been trying to figure out my blog persona.

I know a lot of you will clamour–just be yourself! Sure, I would’ve been myself but it’s just so hard to figure out what that self is. I’ve been looking, I can assure you. No doubt, I’ve been irritating a lot of folks, first, by promising to be a rather lightly heavy handed blogger (you’ll know what I mean if you see an older post), and then an overly easy one, becoming one of those people who are always able to think discretely: 10 ways to do this, 5 ways to do that (sort of like God who just managed to create the world in 7 days).

I’ve tried to be funny too in several posts, rather sad in others, and quite inspiredly emotional in some, the sort of purple prose that went out of fashion with the Victorians (ones you can experiment with only as Mr. or Ms. Bottledworder).

But will the bottle get out of shape with too many of us/ me’s? Continue reading Writing my blog persona or brand →

Uncategorized

Unusual ways we’re using the TV

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If household objects were people and they could be psychoanalysed, which object would occupy the prime position as the most attention seeking, the least self-effacing, the loudest, the most narcissistic, the most colourful and preening member of the inanimate world? Continue reading Unusual ways we’re using the TV →

Uncategorized

Why blog?

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Sketch of gallery

Okay. So I decided to write something little, something small whenever I feel like it. Isn’t that really what writing is all about? I mean, writing doesn’t really move mountains, or solve the economic crisis. You may try to hit someone hard with words, but a baseball bat is better. A few years ago, I saw a big cow eat an entire book. Didn’t make the creature any wiser. She was still standing, tied to a pole, the last I remember.

So then, why do I bother to write these blogs? But more intriguing a question than that, why do some people read other people’s blogs? I mean don’t students just hate assigned readings and teachers hate grading essays? How many students will have their grandmothers die multiple deaths rather than admit they just didn’t do it or teachers invent departmental meetings to avoid contact with the written word in the form of student papers?

So why would you read the ramblings of someone you don’t even know leave alone stand to gain something from? Continue reading Why blog? →

Uncategorized

Facebook and Friendships

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Friendship

In the last few years, something has changed about my understanding of friendships. Before Facebook, I had sort of assumed what a friend was, what friendship meant, and how I myself interacted with friends.

But in a strange way, contrary to a simple idea that Facebook makes me realize the difference between “true” and “false” friends, people I actually know in “real” life vs. people I have barely met or not met at all, my notion of the idea of friendship itself has changed. Continue reading Facebook and Friendships →