Tag Archives: Twitter

Getting Viral is Good/Bad?

Don’t worry. I am not going to post the latest (as on date you read this) meme here which just went viral on social media. You might have already got fed up with it and 10000s of versions of it. It might have been done and dusted by now. Or you might not have encountered that yet. It will hit you soon then. With this Viral popularity, someone would get a huge exponential surge in their follower’s list. Some viral people would get economic benefits too. Some will try to be viral explicitly by sharing explicit content, or dead bodies in a Japanese forest, or just by playing with one eyebrow, they will get unexpected fame. Even my content had gone mildly viral once. I felt generally happy out of it for some time surely. But that also leaves me with a question.

Something else will get viral tomorrow and the older viral thing would be less viral. Once the hoopla goes down, once people are done with you, once your stardom has seen the end of the curve, how do you deal with it?

I have a concern about the younger people (as well as the older people) regarding this subject. If you don’t know about the most recent viral thing, have you missed out badly? FOMO and all. How does that work out on campuses nowadays? How are you treated if you are not on all the hip-social-media-sites? Or maybe if you are not on anything, maybe that’s hip. Such a difficult time to be a student nowadays.

Concern about older generation is that they were slightly late to jump on the bandwagon but they are finally everywhere. So, when some new viral thing comes, or a new tech comes, how do they deal with this? Is it just cynicism and general contempt about the new generation or do they also feel that they have missed the bus already so at least now they should feel updated?

A few days back I saw a tweet from Amitabh Bachchan worrying about his Twitter follower count.

Or maybe, when one gets older, they become more childish.

I am now neither old nor young and I have not even hit the mid-life crisis yet. And my viral days are already over. What do I do now to stay relevant? Heh.

Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

Roundup 2014

Well, 2014 is over before you could even spell it out. It got over as quickly as your weekends get over if you sleep a little extra. Here’s my round up of 2014 just for the sake of documenting my life for future biography and also for blogging’s sake which I am continuing since last 7 years or so (Don’t know why).

I know you weren’t able to follow through on your resolutions, as always and same way, 2014 was quite an eventful year for me as well. I ticked off a few things from my bucket list as completed and deleted (moved into Sour Grapes Category) a few. Putting them into bullet points to make the post look longer and more readable:

  • Things like buying a motorcycle and getting a new job in a company which was my favorite company during a particular week in 2005 (since I am working here now, masha-allah, it still is) was successfully accomplished. This sounds like very archaic but it is not.
  • Apart from the usual yada yada, we all became more Cynical (High 5! Wait no, Low 5!), gained some more weight and pissed off more people than getting pissed off by.
  • I also got into Twitter debates (Yes, this was the all-important polarizing, divisive election year so I have made it large finally but still as a faileb) and got called names, one of which rhymes with the phrase ‘ You are so Cute yeah!’.
  • Got my name published in some newspaper/website for posters (again), which is a surprisingly good thing that it is still going on like 2012.
  • Got into the act of hitting and getting hit on to reassure my belief that I am still a human. (Who was the idiot who devised this act of flirting to be called as Hitting? Weird.)
  • Talking of the point above, I did manage to ruffle some feathers by not giving in to the process of spamming FB with photos of weddings and honeymoons. Yet. So you still have a chance. But you had this chance for years, no? Useless fellows.
  • Although, I couldn’t go on any world tour because of my busy schedule of sleeping on weekends (what have I become!), but I did sneak a 2 day weekend visit to Pondicherry, which was a good pleasant time and gave me a lot of pics to Instagram.
  • Also, I met Sidin Vadukut (who doesn’t want to meet him and ask about Whale joke, which I did ask BTW) at Bangalore Literature Festival. Also, I attended a concert by Shreya Ghoshal which I left midway because it was dinner time while she was singing and everyone knows what our priorities are. I met many other Twitter/Blogger friends too and got into lovely chit chat which could have gone for hours and hours but that can happen some other time too.
  • Talking of dinner, I am giving up all my hopes on Vegetarian food. Man, can’t we think of anything else than Paneer. I am fed up of Paneer. Seriously you guys. Potato which used to be my favorite food item on Earth, is being seriously under-used in this part of the world and mostly my household.
  • I am bored of Acche Din, already. I mean, whatever Govt. is doing good, that would not show results in at least 2 years. And whatever Govt. is doing bad, like not shutting up so-called-Nationalists is getting more attention. And, fed up of seeing Mr. Narendra Modi on TV, Newspaper, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Radio, Roads, etc all the time.
  • I am not going to promise myself the same thing I am promising myself since these last 7 years to blog and write more but I will just say that I will try…

This sums up the year 2014 for me. Let’s see what 2015 brings!

With Lack of Outrages, Tweeple hang up FirstPost Site

New Delhi. 12th June 2013 by Anonymous_Journalism_by_Broadband

In an absolutely inexplicable set of events, Twitter users across the country hung the news portal site FirstPost by overloading it with comments citing their frustrations due to lack of outrage generated on Twitter.

June 11th day was the most unusual day in the history of microblogging site Twitter as there was no event through which Twitter users could fetch any hint of outrageous material to carry out their daily Twitter duties. Normally, a day on Twitter is initiated by ridiculous statement by a politician or a molestation or rape case in NCR or the weather of Bangalore or snow in Chennai or some act by a Bollywood personality in Mumbai or a brilliant performance by Ravindra Jadeja or an Apple event or any event which can be made fun of, literally. But nothing of such nature happened on 11th June. Twitter users had nothing to comment, trend or even play contest yesterday. Even the irritating handles which carry out quizzes were busy in their rare but mandatory real-life activities.

‘I have nothing to outrage today. As I have already outraged over nothingness of outraging, I am getting frustrated more and more.’, tweeted a twitter celeb with handle @Psychedelic_Sundaram.

Similar tweets of frustration were seen from most of the users in India. This build up of frustration took its toll on the news portal FirstPost which usually runs on the content generated by Twitter. As there was nothing on Twitter which could have helped journalists on FirstPost to write an article, they put up an article which stated ‘How boring Twitter had become and is this the right time to pull the plug off it!’. As soon as this post was tweeted by their handle, Twitter users across the country got irked and start commenting on FirstPost’s website. This created a frenzy of comments as everyone on Twitter, as they had nothing to outrage upon, jumped on to the website and crashed its server.

The editor sensed the situation and asked all the staff of 3 people present in the office to evacuate the building faking a mock fire drill. He was caught saying that he feared that people like KRK could attack their office in angst. Rest of the staff was working from home, as usual, couldn’t even post their attendance of the day because of the server outage. As per the last reports, the IT admin team have restarted the servers and meanwhile a pub related incident has occurred in Gurgaon. IT admin believes that since at least something outrage worthy has happened, people might get distracted from the site and get back on to Twitter doing the best they can do, that is to outrage.