e Magus

I n the   social psychology   of groups,   social loafing   is the phenomenon of people deliberately exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a   group   than when they work alone. (Source: Wikipedia ). However, I’m going to put forward my views of social loafing from the prism of online The time spent of social networking platforms is increasing phenomenally.   This can be attributed to 2 factors mainly driven by technology advancements – -        Accessibility -        Time on hand However in an effort to stay relevant and active in the platform, people are resorting to a different kind of social loafing… The popularity of ‘like’ button compared to the ‘comments’ is a wonderful example. The reason is the ‘liking’ a post or pic takes less effort than to create a comment Similarly are the social sharing buttons on websites, and other features like ‘sh...

W ith great power comes great responsibility, said Voltaire. Well you can also attribute its popularity to Spiderman's uncle too :) When Technology gave us, the general public, the great power of Social Media, we didn't become more responsible, only more frivolous The aftermath of the Hyderabad bomb blasts which took place on Feb 21st saw a slew of Facebook updates and Tweets in my network ranging from benign to malicious. More dangerous were the purportedly expert opinions without proper basis. The same could be seen on popular blogs/websites too which treads on conspiracy theories. This lead me to think, why do people create such conspiracy theories and why it is popular among social media The crux of conspiracy theories lies in the 2 primal human traits - Fear and Greed. Fear helped us survive and greed helped us to evolve as human beings. Most conspiracy theories are based on Greed - Money or Power, and the culprits are usually, Corpo...

Most people think that we are not ourselves, when we are online. True? True. While we tend to fake most of what we say or do in the online space, especially in Social Media platforms – we somehow are more real than we would be in real life. Most of our actions and utterances in real life depend on our immediate environs. The impact of where we are, whom we are with, and about whom we talk; all impacts on what we do and say. For example: saying ‘No’ face to face to a friend is harder than typing ‘No’ on a chat window, email, or even a tweet According to John Suler, the ‘online disinhibition effect’ can be further divided into benign and toxic disinhibition (The Pyscology of Cyberspace – The Online Disinhibition http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/disinhibit.html ). Suler goes on to talk about six prime factors that influences the way we behave in the online space 1)    You don’t know me (Dissociative Anonymity) 2)    You Can’t see ...

The most preferred time for marketers and advertisers on Television is the ‘Prime time’. By definition it means – “ the time period when the television or radio audience is the largest”. Now for years, this block of programming is based on time (Evening hours between 8 PM to 11 PM) or between programming that gathers maximum eyeballs, like sports events. One of the reasons of prime time being there, as mentioned in Wikipedia is – “ Most people tend to watch television at prime time because most people who are usually tired coming home from work or school tend to watch TV, usually right after dinner…” But, is reach of the communication the only reason for advertisers to flock across to prime time? I guess not. Literally, there is much more than what meets the eye (and when) We all are aware that advertising works on the basis of stimulus and response.   Psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his essay “How Mental Systems Believe” theorizes about believing...

One of the main characteristic of any mass media is its ability to impact the society. Be it the newspapers, television or radio, each had played its part, in terms of changing views and shaping the society. In the recent past, there have been many news articles about the impact of social media in the civil society movements… Be it Coffee Party in America, The elections in Iran, the civil movements in Tunisia, Egypt (#Twitterrevolution) and other Arab countries...or, closer home, the Team Anna’s anti corruption movement in India…. Social media usage has become an important tactic in terms of spreading awareness and mobilizing support. The question is - has social media come of age? If you look at the history of mass media… it has always been associated with politics. In fact, it is referred to as “fourth estate”, the other 3 being Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. Traditional mass media was and has been controlled by a few (Just imagine, more than 90% of mass media consumed ...

Couple of things that happened recently, made me think… Has the growth of technology (esp. Internet) actually diminished the value of information? 2 reasons that got me thinking were - 1) I was planning to make a Goan dish – Vindaloo... I logged on to the Internet to check the recipe. I read it, used it to make the dish. All throughout, I never made an effort to remember the recipe and process of making it…One reason could be - In case I need the same information in the future, I could get it at the click of a button… 2) In the past few weeks… the (scam) news sequence could be summed up as follows – IPL scam>CWG scam>2G scam>Adarsh>Media Tapes. While each of the news is important in terms of the freshness and context…the value we attach to the previous incident diminishes drastically with each passing day. The News today has a short shelf life About 20 years back, (access to) information was scarce. The only known and popular sources of information were – the books, Newspap...