9 AM classes are never cool. Apparently that’s the time we get into our “Zombie mode” (Of course I’m talking about MBA guys). Probably our body clocks are nicely tuned to Yankee clocks. My hummingbird attention span wasn’t helping me either. I wasn’t able to get even iota of stuff that was going in the class. But then there is one thing available 24 X 7 for your rescue: Get WIFIed. A glance at my homepage was enough to get me out of dormancy. Oh my apology I forgot to mention my homepage: Facebook. As expected I could see umpty number of ‘K’omrades logged into FB and home-page flooded by FB quizzes, comments & Vineet Saini’s ubiquitous “thumbs-up” & “ambivalent smiley :|”. The most recent fever being the “Mahabharata” on FB.
With every single page refresh, I could see new posts pouring in & every single blessed with witty comments. Some were busy in letting their creative writing skills ooze out in form of status messages while other were engrossed in showcasing their whimsicality in form of comments on others’ posts. I also jumped into the “word-war”. And why wouldn’t I? Make hay while the sun shines. Actually I reckon how could someone resist not being part of such a fun?
I see this as a “Chain Reaction”. Just a little spark and BOOM: it explodes through the entire network. It’s not only Facebook or some other social networking sites for that matter (This although does deserve a special mention; How else do you explain a 5 year old website with more than 250 million active users!!) . You can observe the same explosion in our daily lives as well. We love to go to cricket stadium just to be part of the Mexican wave or boo the opponent team’s player while we could have easily settled into our cosy beanbags and shouted our lungs out “Mom! Please make me a sandwich…extra cheese …”. One group mail or multicast on IP messenger and we rush to NC to shower our blessings on the birthday boy’s butts (pardon me for sounding offensive but the more courteous I wanted it to be, lesser fun it was).
People love to do things which everybody is doing. I guess that’s the human psychology. To some extent it would be justified to say that our acceptance quotient in the society is proportional to the number of chain reactions we are part of. Marketers have banked on such chain reactions for quite some time. Companies encourage the customers to write reviews and testimonials for the products on the websites. iPod has been like a highly contagious flu that everybody seems to be infected with. Google is no more a name for search engine; but more of a verb. Companies are using social networking sites to reach out to new customers. The number of companies using the automated advertising system run by Facebook has tripled over the last year with biggies like Coca-Cola & Starbucks being the some of the successful proponents of such strategies.
Enough of gyan for now. I’ve some 20 new posts to go through on Facebook. Adios…
