When the 20th century was still young, Cole Porter famously crooned “...birds do it, bees do it/ Even educated fleas do it/ Let’s do it, let’s fall in love!” ...With Twitter and Facebook, we could add, as the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close.SRK and Big B do it, Priyanka and Bipasha do it, Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi do it, even Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi do it. So the aam enabled-aadmi can hardly be blamed for following suit. There is no doubt that social networking has been the star activity of 2010, and promiscuity in it has been the catalyst for many of the highs (or some would say, lows) of this year.
Time was when social networking meant being seen at all the power gatherings of the year — preferably arriving fashionably late and being mobbed by adoring acolytes to the sycopated clicks of Page Three cameras.
Now, no air-kissing social gadfly or well-connected VIP has truly arrived until there are tweets and Facebook mobile updates — or at the very least, bouts of BBMing — from them in real time on every muah and bon mot exchanged.
And that goes for all kinds of gatherings. From marketing to market researching, PR to e-commerce, fan sites to transcontinental family & friends connectivity, social media is the answer to everything. “It’s made us wilder and more circumspect!” laughs PR professional and social diarist Nikhil Khanna.
So, not only are b****y fashionistas and bratty bigda betas doing it, the now iffy genre of lobbyists and blustery image managers are doin’ it too; even politicos don’t want to be left out of the party.
If the somewhat more sustained, less indiscreet Facebook and blogging options are added to the short-term gratification of tweeting, it can safely be said practically everyone’s been doing it in 2010 — in some form or the other. No wonder the population of mobile and internet users is multiplying so fast!
“Social networking platforms have not only helped build an emotional connect but also deepen relationships,” says Santosh Desai, CEO, Future Brands. “Time and distances no longer matter when we want to communicate with friends now.” Yes, social media’s love-fest truly knows no bounds, geographic, familial, political or parochial. So cyberspace is now an orgy of voices and insta-opinions, unadulterated and often unintelligible.
“Social media today blurs the lines between privacy and voyeurism,” avers brand consultant and compulsive Facebook updater Suhel Seth. “It is seen both as a badge of arrival and of promoting envy... Facebook allows people to be more voyeuristic while Twitter is the more ‘engaged’ medium with godliness built in, thanks to followers!”
Indeed, crowd-pulling used to be a function of oratory and charisma; now, popularity and celebrity is measured by social network followers as much as box office takings or election victory margins.
Not that it always works. Twittering Tharoor won the Thiruvananthapuram seat by polling a total of 3,26,725 votes in 2009, but lost his ministerial gaddi in 2010 despite having over 6 lakh Twitter followers.
Many battles raging in Twittersphere
It must be added, however, that Tharoor got public kudos from Shahrukh Khan, no less, for his Twitter numbers and a channel even gave him an award for his ‘achievement’!
That was cold comfort, though, for the articulate Congress MP as his world came crashing down thanks to a single vengeful Twitter from Lalit Modi: “A big? I was told by him not to get into who owns Rendezvous. Specially Sunanda Pushkar. Why? The same has been minuted in my records...” The rest is history.
The slew of senior journalists in the dock over the Radia revelations also realised too late the power of a million mutinous tweets now. First they vented their ire in posts and then their protestations. Finally, they bowed to the clamour of tweets and offered their mea culpas.
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