Articles Comments

Swordarm » Entries tagged with "social media"

Breaking the Neo-Caste Barrier

March 1st, 2017 | 1 Comment

An interesting, and for most of us, encouraging, phenomenon is visible in India today. It is the brick by brick dismantling of the neo-caste system in our society. Of course, the caste system per se was abolished by our constitution shortly after independence, yet the same independence slowly engendered this other, equally insidious neo-caste system in the country. It had only two gradations in it’s scheme of things – ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Us’ being the ‘upper caste’, the progenitors and propagators of the system, and ‘them’ being the rest of us. From politics to bollywood to newsrooms, seminar rooms to the social circuit, members of the neo-elite had ready access. It worked very well to propagate careers of member’s progeny with their own domains – politicians kin getting tickets and star … Read entire article »

Filed under: Aam Aadmi, Blogitorial, Common man, Democracy, Politics

Feeding the wrong dog will kill off Twitter

October 13th, 2016 | Add a Comment

Feeding the wrong dog will kill off Twitter

In an insightful piece in the Mumbai Mirror, @PritishNandy has highlighted the reasons why he feels Twitter is dying. Commercialisation, politicisation, and the emergence of the much maligned supra nationalist troll – all these have led to a sharp decline in the quality of discourse. This, he feels, is directly reflected in the fall in the evaluation of Twitter’s price in the eyes of prospective buyers. He laments the end of open, intelligent debate and … Read entire article »

Filed under: Internet, Politics

Browbeating of service officers by defence journalists

May 30th, 2016 | Add a Comment

  This is a follow up of a prior post on the issue of online intimidation by journalists, specially of serving armed forces officers. I was witness to a similar incident, where a pair of journalists ganged up upon someone, apparently a serving officer. It started when the officer objected to one of them linking recent statements of Gen VK Singh as minister to question his selection for army by the SSB. The journalist, instead of arguing the point raised, started mocking the questioner, and soon his colleague joined in taunting the officer. He even insinuated that the officer was being paid a ‘twitter allowance’ for his tweets. Undeterred, the officer persisted with his original query.   The journalist’s reply was a shocker – that just because the general had served in the army, … Read entire article »

Filed under: Media, Military

Who’s Tweeting What – Modi Vs Kejriwal

May 23rd, 2016 | Add a Comment

Who’s Tweeting What – Modi Vs Kejriwal

Having followed both @narendramodi and @arvindkejriwal on twitter for a while, I noticed a distinct pattern to the way they each tweet. To confirm my impressions, I did a detailed analysis of their tweets over a period of the past 50 days (1 Apr to 20 May 2016) and tried to broadly group them into different categories. For ease of comparison, I tried to make the categories as similar as possible. Wherever this was not … Read entire article »

Filed under: Politics

Do you REALLY ‘Like’ me?

July 11th, 2013 | 2 Comments

Politicians in India have discovered social media with a vengeance. After the runaway success of the initial forays of a few, and abject failure of others to control free expression, the political herd is now aspiring to graze on the green pastures of facebook and twitter. Latest to hit the news is Ashok Gehlot, the Congress Chief Minister of Rajasthan – though not for the right reasons. He has apparently gained sudden popularity on facebook, attracting over one lakh followers in one month. The bad news is that he has more followers in Istanbul than in Jaipur. One had heard of politicians buying votes, but spending money to receive virtual ‘likes’ from people who are not even part of the electorate doesn’t indicate political acumen, or even common sense. Actually, … Read entire article »

Filed under: Politics