Precisely two weekends ago a new Facebook group was launched — ‘The best of JNU’ — and within a week 200 members joined in. “Let us enroll 1800 by 1st January”, wrote a hopeful member. Grey-haired middle-aged men and women, many of them grandparents now, are re-discovering old friends and reliving old days. “The last I marched in a demonstration was against the Emergency,” writes a group member, now an official of the government! Many of the members have not met each other since they left campus more than three decades ago, but they are all equally excited logging onto the internet and socialising with imagined communities. The JNU group is just one of many such internet groups that now help reconnect old friends. High school sweethearts long separated, now grandparents and sitting at home and surfing the net, are establishing contact and meeting long-lost friends and loves. Surely, the global level of happiness must have gone up.
Not necessarily. Just as internet communities bring joy to their members, many also end up spreading hatred against others. It is moot whether happiness-spreading friendship groups have more members than hate-spreading associations. Either way, the net creates and sustains communities of people who do not have to physically socialise. Imagine the energy saved, human as well as all other forms of energy. People do not have to travel to attend gatherings of the like-minded; they can just sit at home in front of their computer and be engaged in social discourse. But, there is a difference. When a hundred like-minded people gather to sing, celebrate, protest or conspire, they have the ability to make an impact on their immediate surroundings. They create noise, they can disrupt traffic, they can cause law and order problems and they can also bring fun and entertainment to a neighbourhood, depending on what they do when they get together. But, when atomised internet communities get together, they make no impact at all on their immediate neighbourhoods, but can disrupt the life of cyber-neighbours.
Can governments do much about this? Should they? Societies around the world take very different views on such questions. In China the authorities are very intrusive, in India hardly so. But if internet hatred overtakes internet friendship, a time will come when social pressure would favour some monitoring and regulation, if not an outright ban, of such internet socialising. Tomes have been written already about the social consequences of social networking and, as always, the advertiser and salesperson is not far away. The use of social networks to market products, brands, ideas and experience is pervasive. When Vance Packard wrote his classic book The Hidden Persuaders (1957) on the power of the subliminal image and the secret of suggestive salesmanship, he was analysing the more obvious tools of the likes of Goebbels and American supermarkets. Today, subliminal seduction has been perfected to a finer art and the net is the medium of the message.
There can be no better moment to exploit the vulnerability of a happy consumer than the moment when old friends meet and celebrate their togetherness in space. Getting an advertisement tossed in at that moment can help, even if it appears to be a diversion at the time. What better way to get to the middle-aged audience that will not step out and see a hoarding? Even those who network without socialising and socialise without networking fall prey to hidden persuaders.
