February 2016 – My Blah

The Victory of Facebook

The moment you read a heading like this, you probably think the Net Neutrality (see my articles on the topic) has lost, or Facebook has signed some new deal, or invested in groundbreaking tech. It could be all of this, and I’d be happy if it were. But this article is – somewhat belatedly – a celebration of something entirely different. This time, I’ll celebrate the victory of Facebook’s purpose, and a lot more.

Let’s go back to when it all began. 2005 was it ? 2007 ? Somewhere around that time. Remember hi5 ? Remember Orkut ? And then we all came to Facebook.

Pourquoi ?

Well, ostensibly so we could all connect on social media. That was a big word, and a tad unnecessary at the time. I mean, we had phones and SMS and email right? And early Facebook was too rudimentary to be something really revolutionary right ? Right ?

Looking back, it was, but we still climbed the bandwagon. We sought out friends who had already joined, and asked others to join, and still others. Then when we felt enough people weren’t around in the chat, or posting updates, we added more people. People we didn’t know, we didn’t care about and frankly, people we only wanted to like our stuff.

This serve the purpose of social media – connecting people remotely in a manner as close to real life as possible. Numerous memes have been made about how acting like we do on Facebook would land us in real trouble in real life, but it’s hard to deny that we have turned Facebook into a second life. (which reminds me, what became of Second Life, the social game ?)

How so ? For beginners, we met friends and talked with them, as we do in real life. Then we added people we didn’t know, as we would in real life. We were circumspect, wondering what sort of people they would be. Some turned out to be idiots (or creeps, or jerks, or sickos, or perverts, if girls were involved) but others became friends. This was like going to a party and meeting new people. Except that every moment was a party, and we already knew something about each person we met courtesy the About section.

So that’s what it became, a place to meet and greet, chat and chatter, snarl and snooze. Maybe not snooze, though I distinctly remember the “moon” icon next to people’s chat icons. Maybe also not meet, because many a times we never met the people who we met regularly online. Maybe nothing, but in the end, we got to “know” a lot more people. Once we knew them, we learned some of them were fake, while others were simply out there to get something out of us. The filtering went on, and we found “true” friends. Sort of, kind of…..

But was it all ? Yes, it was. What did we do beyond clicking photos and uploading them, sending texts and pokes, playing games and sending requests and generally making asses of ourselves ? Did we realize that there could be more to it ? Nope, we did not. It would always remain a place to chat with friends, an auxiliary to our physical existence.

Saying all that has changed would be a massive understatement. Perhaps we could say that our physical existence has become an auxiliary to our Facebook life. But that would truly be hyperbole. So what do we say ?

First, we could say that Facebook has become a place where you could meet a range of people with specific political and social ideas. So Facebook has become not just a place to meet people, but to meet ideas. You could say that was always the case, but the quality and depth of the ideas has changed. As more and more intellectuals and radicals join the platform, debates arise which earlier would never have taken place. Sifting through my old posts, I’m surprised to find how, even when I was an active student activist, I seldom made political statements on Facebook. Reason is, there was very little debate.

Nowadays however, everything that happens anywhere is instantly put before us in the most strongly worded – and sometimes – well-considered manner possible. Every medium of communication, be it TV, newspaper or even the streets themselves, have an echo on Facebook. It is impossible to escape, and why should you ? Isn’t interaction with ideas and politics a facet of the political animal ? Now the political animal has gone on the WWW and the result is a devastating amount of information, ideas and debates.
Second, and related to the first, is the ability of everyone to have an impact. Pretty girls post selfies and they garner thousands of likes, which spurs them to create entire quasi-communities of admirers. That’s impact for you. Err, no, that’s not it.

Impact can be seen when small issues, otherwise buried in half inch articles, become posts in their own right. Someone is suffering from cancer and needs funds. Why would a newspaper or channel cover him/her ? But a facebook post manages that and hopefully, funds do turn up. The funny part is that most of these small issues are brought up by people who we don’t know. Some are friends of friends while others are individuals we “follow”. Or pages we “like”. Through these, we are exposed to a far wider range of facts and information that we could ever have if we’d confined ourselves to friends on facebook. Real life friends that is.

Third, rather amusingly, Facebook friendships have come to reflect real life friendships. You could always defriend (a new word, mind you) someone for hurting your feelings. But what about political opinions ? What if you don’t want to hear what you consider to be leftist or rightist or something-ist hogwash ? Unfriend (another new word!!) immediately. If needed, block him/her. This would be the equivalent of refusing to talk to someone you meet on the street because of “differences”. Some may say it is childish, others may say it is one’s freedom to meet or refuse to do so. Whatever it is, Facebook has now taken on another aspect of our real lives.

Fourth, and rather regrettably, we are entering the era of the online hujuk and keccha. Remember a certain Hutom writing in the 19^th Century ? back then, due to poor literacy, the ordinary folk believes whatever was told to them. Nowadays, if we hear anything on the street, we’re likely to Google it. Read it in a nicely worded and colourful post, and you believe it. Stupid claims, like India’s national anthem being called the best anthem in the world, are examples of hujuk. The Delhi case in which a girl claimed to have been threatened (only to be found with AAP political motives later) is an example of keccha.

Fifth, we have become expert stalkers. At least us guys. Clicking photos of girls in public (or private I guess) without permission is an offence. Following a girl to know her whereabouts is an offence too. Making lewd gestures at her is an offence too. Theoretically, all of these are probably offences in the cyber world under the Indian Information Act I guess. In reality, who’s stopping you from hitting “See Full Size” (oh the innuendo!) beneath a girl’s photo, photoshopping it, “following” her to see all her public posts and then sending all sorts of crap stuff to her.

This has caused a lot of trouble for girls, and guys. For girls, the trouble is twofold. First, as barriers of communication break down and we add people outside our social circles (and classes) to get more likes, we end up adding people with mentalities that are very different. The crasser among them end up sending what would be classed as positively obscene comments to girls after “falling in love” with them. What follows is a lot of howling and growling and blocking. But does police complaint follow ? We are all safe behind computers right, so why complain? And obviously, it’s the girl’s fault she put up the picture which led to the comment in the first place. So much like society itself, no ?

The second problem is that there are some smooth movers and shakers. These guys, whom the girl would probably avoid if she could see them in public from the very beginning, create false identities, luring them into meeting them. The rest, as they say, is criminal history.

But guys have trouble too. Trust me, there are sad and honest guys out there who spend a substantial amount of time poring over a variety of girls’ DPs (variety referring to both DPs and girls) and occasionally, masturbating over them. They want to establish friendly relations, and see if any of them go to the point of a relationship. But hey, how do you know a pervert from a genuine friendly guy (even if he is secretly perverted) ? About sections are becoming increasingly blank, friend lists and relationship staii are disappearing from public view and so are, of course, the bread and butter of the frustrated youth – girls’ selfies. One part of mankind is pushing entire man-kind towards doom. Just like real life.

But while we cry over blank About sections, people who have unfriended us and growl over differences of opinion (and all the while ogle at the selfies we do get and the gobble the “information” and the information we get), let us sit back and wonder how far Facebook has become a copy of real life. In lines and lines of code, which none of us will ever bother to fish out and study, we have thrown in our emotions, our life’s memories, our hopes and dreams and all the communications that hold up the tapestry of life. In doing so, we have, feature at a time, made Facebook a home we can never leave without serious withdrawal symptoms.

Here, and only here, do we feel part of our friend circle, ideological circle, pervert circle and along with these, the circle of like-minded and opposite-minded people across the world, regardless of where we are. In this sense, Facebook has succeeded in its mission of bringing friends – in the real and the broader, global sense, together. And it has succeeded in creating a world that is so much richer than anything we can have at any one moment, at least in terms of sheer information. It has created attitudes and tendencies that mimic real life with real life consequences. And it has created a generation that truly holds facebook above a lot in life. For better or worse, facebook has achieved a lot more that it – or we – ever imagined.

Corruption and Plagiarism: Comparisons

Hate is something we are taught, and from this hate we obtain our moral compass. What do we hate, and why do we hate it ? Who taught us to hate, and therefore to love ? What if we stop hating ? Valid questions, but only selectively put forth. I say selectively because they have become legion in cases like communalism (so you’re a beef-eating Muslim $*#$%^$ ?) and sexuality.

But there are other things, patent in society, that we must hate and never question why. Corruption for instance. And then there are things in academia that we hate without questioning. Lecherous teachers who cheat on their wives to make out with their colleagues. Sorry, cut that. Replace it with plagiarism. Yep, that seems safe enough. Corruption and plagiarism, a nice pair (made in the lowest depths of hell).

Now the point is not to raise moral arguments about these – that would make for a very long night indeed. Instead, let’s talk about why we’re taught about these (or learn) and how our hate for them is similar.

Take corruption. It’s that limitless force that causes rust and fungal growth in virtually every human-based structure in the world. More specifically, corruption pertains to the political sphere, where terms like embezzlement, black money, venality, etc. are thrown about with brute vehemence and vindictiveness. In this sphere, corruption generally means taking undue advantage of a system or allowing others to do so. As flies come to wounds, so money comes to the corrupt areas, enriching few and ruining the system and all who depend on it. Hence rations are hoarded and black marketed, pension funds are sucked off, ill-gotten funds are taken away to the Cayman Islands, unworthy get jobs and licenses and virtually everybody has to shell out something to get something done. Something over and above the usual fees that is.

Feeling angry ? Aye, me too. But hold on, let’s get you angrier. Talk of plagiarism. Plagiarism, or plag for short, means the art of taking stuff from people’s intellectual property and using it to decorate your own house. Or build it even. Imagine you worked for years to create a lovely piece of art. Someone comes in and clicks a photo of the canvas. Next day you find that your picture now forms a part of the portfolio of another artist! How can you produce something, put in your heart and soul into it, if you know that people may use it to their advantage ? Where is the respect and returns due to intellectual labour ?

Phew, those are angry words, and typing them out does push your typing speed to its limit. Now I’ll type slowly, and you take a few deep breaths. Let’s talk of idyllic worlds without mosquitoes, plagiarism and corruption.

In this world, the government would be corruption-free (not talking about the AAP here). It would create an education system that would be free of plagiarism, so academia would be corruption free. Why ? Because if we take corruption in the literal sense of being a distortion to something, and in the political sense of helping one and harming other by screwing the system, then plagiarism definitely fits the bill. Plagiarism is a short-cut that allows you to take more credit than is due to you while harming the rights of the ones who actually put in the effort to come up with the plagged work in the first place. A deviation from honest effort ? A short cut that harms one and gives undue advantage to another ? That’s corruption in the grammatical sense. Wait, make that corruption in the grammatical and quasi-political sense.

Academic corruption, or at least part of it, is plagiarism.

So if corruption is the set U, plagiarism is one of the circles in the Venn Diagram. To talk of corruption is to talk of something big, to talk of plagiarism is to talk of something more specific. Something more concrete and measurable, in both definition, practical application and impact.

Really?

You may say that a certain string of words may have been found to be copied from some previous work without a proper footnote. Without going into the intricacies of what a proper footnote is, let’s assume the footnote isn’t there or it’s improper. The reader can’t make out that this is not the original work of the author. Now it is perfectly possible that the author of the plagged work has decided to take credit for what is not his/hers. It is also possible that –

He/she wrote the line in exactly the same fashion and was not aware of the original work.
He/she omitted certain lines from earlier drafts that caused the footnote to be deleted.
He/she had given the footnote earlier and did not bother adding the same book with Ibid. again.
He/she gave the credit to the wrong person and at the wrong place. So the footnote ended up far away from where the quote has been placed (if quote it be).
The text has been taken from web sources which did not credit the author and hence is of dubious validity.

Some of these make your blood boil more, some less. But these are just some of the possibilities. None of them can justify the plagiarism, but they help explain why. Compare them to the works of schoolchildren and you will see.

He copied from a notebook with no name or with an unintelligible name.
His lines came out the same as another boy’s.
He used a guide book and hence could not say where the quote was taken from. He could not tell the teacher he used a guide book, hence he was in trouble.
He found the information scrawled on a board or on a micro-xerox in the toilet.
His parents filled up the text and so used sources which he was not aware of. Of course he could not admit that his parents did the work, so he got into a mess.

Compare this list with the one above, and note how schoolchildren’s mistakes become academics’ mistakes. We’ve been trained to hate plagiarism from a very early age, and this hatred is reflected continuously as, like overzealous kids, we continue to find each other’s faults endlessly. Academics are folks who have passed exams with high marks : they have learned their lessons well.

But have they also attended school on corruption ? For many speak about corruption with so much conviction that they may well have been in the administration itself. In the administration I said, corrupt I did not say. Don’t misquote me!

But such stands perhaps come from the same moral compass that leads to our hatred of plagiarism. Let’s see –

A clerk took money not knowing that he could not take money for the task. Say he has shifted from being an agent of some company to a government employee. Habits die hard, rules are learned slowly.
He overlooked some stuff for someone’s advantage.
He helped someone he normally would have, except this time he credited the wrong person, and at the wrong place!
He interpreted rules according to dubious sources and cynically manipulated them. And was caught.

Note how we need to add “intentionally” to every sentence to prove someone is corrupt. Did we do the same for plagiarism ? We didn’t. This is somewhat unfair on academics, since plagiarism after all falls within the ambit of corruption.

Yet this distinction does not obscure the fact that the two are similar. A schoolkid’s mistakes, an academic’s mistakes and a clerk’s mistakes – all appear similar when put down on pen and paper.

But the similarity doesn’t stop there. Let’s talk of limits. What are the limits of corruption ? Where can one be totally corruption-free, hypothetically and practically ? Similarly, where can one be totally sure that there is no plagiarism. The methods of measuring corruption vary, as do moral compasses. The methods of plagiarism checking vary too, as again do moral compasses. This leads to the domain of both being exceedingly vague. Vagueness lends itself to vigilantism, to finding scapegoats for various purposes and for foisting one set of rules upon another just to serve selfish purposes.

Again, both are easily hidden. There are two ways of doing this. One, you change the rules so that your corruption becomes legal and another’s legality becomes dubious. Similarly, moving from one standard to another, one journal to another, causes the methods to change.

Secondly, you can simply accuse someone else of plagiarism. Or corruption. He/she either makes counter-charges and/or becomes defensive. In the worst case scenario, your corruption is exposed, but by then it is always a political issue.

Fourthly, both become all-encompassing. A corrupt person is corrupt and nothing else. A plagging scholar is nothing but a plagger. A cheater who made his fame without the effort required and is therefore of dubious moral calibre. Corruption and plagiarism don’t become one quality – they become the only quality.

Fifthly, charges are usually levelled by those who are the least productive. They have the least to lose, because their trail of activities is the shortest. So the lazy person, who also fears being attacked for his laziness, seeks to divert attention from himself. Ditto for the lazy academic.

Now let’s go back to school.

“He hasn’t done his homework”
“I didn’t know it was wrong. Won’t happen again!”
“ I thought I’d already done this/that”
“I heard from a friend and decided to do…”
“I didn’t notice/remember…”

Imagine each scenario with an angry teacher, plenty of ironed out student uniforms and souls which are being shaped to be the crusaders against corruption and plagiarism. We have been taught all this, and taught in a way that allows us to apply the same standards to both.

This doesn’t make for a plea of free-thinking. Too much of country and education depend on keeping corruption at bay and plagiarism out for us to let our guard down so we can wonder if the “Police” written on our clothes makes sense or not. Our system was built on these assumptions, we cannot help but shoulder the burden and carry on. We can’t turn our backs for a moment. So we have been taught, so we shall teach our children. Such notions, will at least, uphold the system as it exists. As they say, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

Yet why not reflect? How did we become such creatures, righteous yet monstrous ? Where did we lose our willingness to cooperate instead of fight with everyone else ? Could an alternative have been possible at some point of time ? Why did we accept this morality and not another one ? Why did we not question this when we questioned everything else in the heat of our college years ?

Perhaps these would answer the questions – why do we hate corruption and plagiarism, and why have we been taught to do so ?