Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Pehle aap, pehle aap

Social media is a strange animal. You can't tame it because you can't be sure how it is. It's quite impossible to be certain what will click or won't. The only thing one can do is try. Punch the keys and post the stuff and hope it works. Sometimes, the best of thoughts and campaigns fade away without a blip while the lamest of memes go viral. It's an unfair circus but incredibly entertaining. There's a perverse form of justice here. Many a times, the success of a tweet or a status message or a Instagram post depends a lot on the initial pickup. The early momentum. Herd mentality has a huge role to play in this phenomenon. You see people liking something and you force yourself to like it too. You basically join the crowd, not out of peer pressure. You can choose to be aloof and not click on that green or blue button. It's totally up to you but something in you persuades you to join the gang. It's like volunteering to join the jury of validation. A cute practice and something i've observed for about a decade now. If a tweet gathers 25 RTs within 10 minutes, chances are it will cross 100 easily (although 100 isn't a big number when you compare it to the number of people who work with you on your office floor) but then, that's the beauty of the game! If you ask me, the way a crowd behaves isn't very different from the way it behaves in a local train. If a beggar enters a compartment and people ignore him for a long while, he's going to go marginally empty handed. But if one person offers him a change immediately, then others will be compelled to do the same out of dear pressure. Bottomline: Begging has never been more sophisticated. 

No comments: