Of Rats and Men in the Cyber World

There have been a few requests of elaboration of the phenomena I called the ‘roulette of red notifications’ in my last post when talking about the helpless addiction to the social networks.

While most readers – some grudgingly – have agreed that social networking and constant communication is a sort of dependence and craving similar to substance abuse – something I have called addiction to the packets of data, what is difficult to understand is the relationship between FaceBook and gambling?

There have been studies on the stimulations in the brain correlated to the relative amount of time spent in front of the social networks with similar measurements in cocaine and cannabis addiction. Most of the data is still in experimental stage. Too early for pronouncement of judgement other than for the purpose of publishing hurried papers.

However, I am more inclined to see this addiction in lines of the lure of the casino, the clanking of chips  and the clatter of dice.

Of course, the general populace navigating the FaceBook, Orkut, iPhone and so on are not really playing for millions – making or losing money. Why then do I claim the gambling connection?

The answer can be found within something termed ‘schedule of reinforcement’ by behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner.

In an experiment involving the old reliable rats favoured by scientists, Skinner constructed something called the Skinner Box.  In this set up, a hungry rat would have to press a pedal a number of times to be rewarded with food pellets. The experiment was controlled to find the effect of fixed schedule of reinforcement – in which a pellet was served for a fixed number of presses on the pedal, and a variable schedule of reinforcement – in which the ratio of presses to pellets was random.

It was discovered that variable reinforcement schedules were better for motivating rats. The frenzy of activity increased when the reward was unpredictable. In particular, when the reward ceased, the rats under the fixed schedule of reinforcement stopped working immediately, while the ones under a variable schedule continued. Hope does play a big role.

In the human context, it is akin to having a fixed percentage of sales as bonus pay and as opposed to a variable percentage. The ratty behaviour is replicated in the human world with motivation increasing with the randomness of rewards.
This is the ancient lure of chips, dice, cards and horses kick in. The random rewards that may be attained through gambling, with the welcome clanging of coins disbursed from the slot machine.

Now, let us trade the rat for the mouse infested world.
A recent post on FaceBook by a friend read “I never thought Likes would become so important in our lives.” It rings true like the writing on the Wall it actually was.

The likes, posts, comments , messages – all the red notifications of FaceBook – do not follow a regular pattern. With each refresh, the rewarding visual and intellectual stimulation happens at varied rates, each reward promising gratification of entertainment and social status and acceptance. The same principle applies for emails coming into the mailbox. Whether or not one expects an important mail, a note, a notification – the refresh button is clicked on and on – until the minds become automatons, addicted, waiting for satiation – just another click, and further stimulation if something new crops up – if not, then ... well another click before quitting .

Late into the night. With red, sleep deprived eyes searching for that small red pop up – someone is out there communicating, caring enough to recognise your presence. The unscheduled returns making one cling on to the hope of interaction - hope that a combination of friends and connections in the cyber world will soon collaborate into a socially satisfying jackpot.

Net Effect - Politics 2.0

“The tweet is mightier than the blast,” may be the modern day sequel to analogous sentiments about the pen and the sword and the ballot and the bullet.

Twitter revolution may be crap

The human mind loves a panacea – a miracle cure. If it is powered by technology it becomes science’s answer to faith healing. Technology has made the world so flat that there is no place for the unscrupulous to hide. Any transgression which compromises human values will be scrapped – or tweeted, posted, walled, texted – electronically transferred across to millions of desktops, laptops, iPhones and so on and so forth …

Stop, stop … conspiracy theory has its clientèle, but we are sick and tired of a pessimistic psychiatrist casting his morose shadow over the dawn of a new era. More or less this is how my dear friend Shruti will always react, shaking her pretty and formidably intelligent head vigorously when I start bursting hopeful bubbles of the social network revolution.

I repeat my observations about the so called twitter revolution in Iran. New York Times had dramatised it as a battle between bullets and tweets. Supporters of social networks and technology had raised their electronic hands in collaborated salute to the victory of democracy in the cyber world.

And yet, in a detailed study after the debris of immediate euphoria were removed, it is declared that no more than 60 active twitter accounts exist in Iran. This revelation by Al Jazeera has largely put to rest the romantic christening of the twitter revolution. Yet, more to my point is what followed in its wake.

With the endorsement of the American media – the cyber urban myth of twitter protests caught on. And when the State department requested Twitter to delay the scheduled maintenance fearing disconnection of rebellious tweets, the Iranian authorities decided to put an embargo on social networks. The FaceBook accounts of the ones entering the country were checked for possible anti-national leanings.
The social networks can as easily be used by an unscrupulous authority to achieve exactly the opposite of the freedom and democracy that many believe the Internet and technologies bless us with. Besides, as Evgeny Morozov points out in his pessimistic manifesto The Net Delusion, the publicised optimism of the west about the social networks make the authoritarian regimes more vigilant when it comes to information flow.

Great Firewall of China

I have often maintained, that the propensity of the generation to be more focused on the world wide web rather than the whole wide world makes it more prone to manufactured consent. China has shown us that it is possible to be economically active on the web even when free information flow is restricted by the great firewall – showing that the world has remained stubbornly spherical in some regions. Add to that, it has an army of paid government bloggers for prodding the electronic herd into the desired mindset. In another part of the world, Hugo Chavez is on twitter and there is a reason behind it.

I refuse to believe that the West is absolutely innocent in this regard. With the cyber snifferbots busy detecting dissident phrases, keywords and sensitive information, is no censorship, blocking and spying performed by the friendly neighbourhood organisations like CIA and NSA? Legions of stasis need not be deployed for big brother to watch you in the new world view, some programmed bots will do it efficiently. And thanks to the esoteric electronic world, there will be no file storage establishments to be converted into museums later on. The virtual world is heaven for mind controllers.

Apart from this, let us not forget a very basic premise. The Internet, at the end of the day, is a huge source of entertainment for many, social networking most frivolously so. A captivating source of distraction which also boosts our ego by providing the pseudo satisfaction of projecting us as limited but zealous political messiahs.
If all that it takes to satisfy our politically conscious gene is to share a wall post, we can turn to the next semi pornographic item number on you tube with a clear conscience. With all these television channels and delicious feeds awaiting us on social media, is there too much time left for the traditional news channel? I think not. Political consciousness is not being built by the individual today through general awareness ... it is being mass manufactured in the cyber world by tweets and wall posts.
And when constant entertainment in this form is available, very few individuals actually think of taking to the streets for issues which are close to their heart. As it is, a important issues of one moment are buried in the next through information overload. Just reflect at how quickly WikiLeaks has been relegated to the remote recesses of our psyche.

The cross on the TV Tower

When the Fernsehturm , the TV tower in Berlin, stood reaching way up towards the heavens, almost in Freudian symbolism, the two Germanys used it to mock each other. To the East Germans, it was something that showed the West the stature and progress of the communist east. While the West Germans pointed out that when the sun shone on the silvery ball, the light was reflected in the shape of a cross, God’s way of mocking the godless. The Americans were happy at the promise of a better world that the people under a commie regime could witness from the American television shows. However, the truth was something much more down to earth. With the entire country tuning in to American television shows for relaxed entertainment, very few remained willing to take to the streets for a revolution.

History, in this sense, is being retold with technological amplifiers. The constant diversion, provided in the manner of the unpredictable roulette of red notifications and messages waiting, make addicts out of the majority – consuming the packets of data, clicking away in connected stupor. For authoritarian regimes, governments with vested interests, and the expanding imperialists, the opium of the people has been manufactured anew. Revolutions may not need suppression anymore – a well crafted and shared writing on the wall will do it admirably.

Political Consciousness on Facebook

Blog of Simple Simon: Ritual Dance of Meetings

Blog of Simple Simon: Ritual Dance of Meetings:

This has been written by my good friend Simon van der Wiel.

Since he has taken the trouble, I am using the best practice taught to me by social networking - share.

Thanks Simon. Meetings do have primal roots, and I wish you all the best for withstanding them.

Highs and Lows - Bipolar world wide web

The Queen of England has entered Facebook and the surfing serfdom has responded with 200000 likes.

Sarah Palin has discovered that Twitteratti is suitable for Political proclamations, probably because given the 140 character limit, she would not be expected to defend her dramatic statements.

However, while the conservative, liberal, old world and new world politicians join the social networking bandwagon, some mysterious game is afoot.

A while back, members of a group called Digg Patriots had been banding together to promote conservative leaning online stories. On the social networking site Digg, which presaged Facebook and Twitter, they were burying the articles of certain users within a couple of hours by posting their own comments over them in bulk.

While Digg Patriots were taken down after a website revealed their curious antics, and Digg itself has been left behind in the race by technologically more robust Facebook and Twitter which are immune from such burying tactics, it does raise a few questions.

Web 2.0 as I see it, acts more like a peripheral device for the modern brain. This is nothing sensational or new. Human beings have for ever been subject to the information that has flowed from the news print, television, movies, other media and now the internet. What is radically alarming to me is that, in this environment, where the individuals themselves seem to play a role in communicating and being a part of the propaganda juggernaut, manufactured consent is ever more easy.

While control of news and media by powers that be is not new by any stretch of imagination, modern times with Wikipedia, Google,Twitter and Facebook make it ridiculously easy for those with vested interests to mass manufacture favourable arguments and consent. Included in the step is the easy to use make-believe 'power' vested in the individual to forward and like the propaganda. This gives surfers the manufactured feel of playing an active part in social consciousness.

What we see often is manufactured groupthink orchestrated across these networks. This  not only promotes the propaganda, but also ensures that the population sincerely believe that they 'support' and 'like' and 'retweet' their own opinion, playing a major part in the important global movements.

With the sensory delights of the web, the clickable links promising plenty of reward with minimum of expended effort, aural, visual and also tactile touchscreen delights there for the taking, the millions cannot be expected to dwell on a particular issue for more than the half a minute before moving on to the next you-tube video or iTunes download. And if a supposedly socially conscious thought rolls by with thousands of likes, aggregated with web based evidence and agreement, it is easy to put the click of consent and pamper one's political consciousness, before moving to the next link of entertainment.

With the aid of agents and programs, it is not really a theoretical or technological stretch for sufficiently powerful interests to manufacture and append web based evidence and agreement. In the virtual world, a lot of the facts are .. well ...virtual ... and sadly, our netizens are growing more and more oblivious of the fact. The worldview that is being presented as the external consciousness of the current mass of mankind can be more virtual than ever before.

Retweet Your Revolution

My young politically conscious friend, the lovely Shruti Rattan, continues to view my cynicism about the internet and its effects on the worldview through her own sceptic spectacles.

When I claim social networking is instrumental in reducing the human free will for decision making and makes the derived species of netizens more and more susceptible to the phenomena of easy manufactured consent, she retaliates vociferously. The networked world, powered by Web 2.0, according to her, is more ideally evolved for social revolution than at any point of history. With one click of the mouse or flick of a thumb across a touchscreen, it is now possible to make the news of social evils available across the world. Tweets were what made Tehran stand up for freedom and democracy – and the Moldova revolution against their communist government can be called a Twitter revolution. Social networking brings unlimited empowerment to social activism. In one of our cannabis conferences, she even went on to state that the Berlin Wall was ripped down as a result of better communication through digitisation.

Mark Pfeifle, a former US  national-security adviser, has even written calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors are all across the cyberworld, spreading awareness, pushing for change.
“You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, according to Glassman, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

Let us look at these puzzling claims, which have a strange whiff of overdone hype. With the screening of movies about Facebook and numerous instant best sellers about the power of the social networks, with a industry expectedly growing around the networking tools, it is natural that hype will be voiced and will be tweeted and retweeted, shared and reshared, posted and liked across the cyber world. But does it really

mean that much, even if one chooses to ignore the audacious claim that Al Qaida is stuck in Web1.0?

Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had limited  internal significance in Moldova. Very few Twitter accounts exist in the country. Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Pos that the entire revolution may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. 'In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.'

In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

The fact remains that there is a developing false consciousness about the past through our connectedness, that communications did not really exist in the pre internet days. All the new stray facts and experiences seem to be herded into the category – social networking innovations.
I will again revisit the statement of my young friend as stated in the beginning of this article.         'With one click of the mouse or the flick of a thumb on a touch-screen, it is now possible to make the news of the social evils available across the world.'

My problem with social revolution aided by Twitter and Facebook is exactly that. One click of a mouse, one flick of the thumb on the touhcscreen. All done in the comfort of air conditioned offices or on a smug bedside table.  This is not instigated by a large racist white policeman throwing one off the train in South Africa. There is no palpating heart which skips every time a member of the local gang of white toughs enter the restaurant in Greensboro in the 1960s where one sits protesting because the establishment refused to serve a black man. Facebook, Twitter and their clones are at best armchair activism where involvement and outrage last about thirty seconds before moving on to the next  post announcing someone's procuring  a Cow on Farmville.

To me, what passes for socially networked activism is often in large quantities the kick one gets from nursing narcissism. From communicating his own political consciousness and scoail conscience to the whole wide world at the press of a button. It is often giant ego boosting self promoting propaganda. And sometimes an apology of social principles - throwing small change of Like, Comments, Retweets and Share into the donation box of issues while the juggernaut of life carries us hurtling along.

A little more probing gets down to the nature of the relationships involved in social networking and social activism. The freshmen who launched the crucial protest in Greensboro – leading to the emancipation of the black American people – were classmates and shared dorms. Let us look at some more examples. The revolutionaries in the Italian Red Brigade, the anti Taliban rebels in Afghanistan, the opposition groups in East Germany, the freedom fighters Bhagat Singh, Jaigopal, Rajguru and Sukhdev … All had one common trait shared with the four freshmen who sat down in protest against the 'We don't serve negroes' rebuff. They were connected through strong ties of friendship. The groups were formed by closely knit young men who knew each other intimately before being joined by a common cause. The East German, the Italian and the Afghan activist groups shared the trait of having close friends in the revolution before plunging in it themselves. Bhagat Singh teamed up with college buddies.

Activism is always built a cause, but it also involves taking substantial risks and standing up for one's team. The primary features of social activism is taking a stand where dangerous implications are involved, and to do this one needs faith in one's mates. That is one of the reasons we see friendship and bonding being core differentiators in every successful activist group.

Contrast this with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook at best is a tool for managing weak ties that would not have bound otherwise. People with whom you would probably not be able to remain in touch in normal life. As noted in a previous post, people collect more friends on Facebook than they would be able to have a casual drink with in real life.
And Twitter is a place to follow the instant thoughts of people one hasn't even met.

So, can one hope to achieve social revolution through Social Networks? I would not put my money on it.
Facebook and Twitter have their serious uses. They work on weak ties and hence it is a great place to spread the news where not too much is asked from people – what suffices is exactly a click of a mouse or a flick of a thumb on the touch-screen. For example, forwarding petitions for the change of legislation, for reporting the requirement of blood of a particular group for a particular terminally ill patient. All these have their uses.
The other advantage is that new connections, new ideas and new opportunities are most likely to come from weak associations. Scientifically speaking, if you have strong ties with some individuals, you would be likely to know the avenues and the opportunities they can introduce you to … and chances are that you have already explored them. However, with people you don't know that well, there is always the chance of stumbling upon some prospects that come as a complete surprise and open up new avenues.

However, as far as social activism and revolution is concerned, weak ties are not exactly what I would recommend. We have already covered the area of armchair activists of whom not a lot is asked for. Added to this, two more reasons make it very difficult for Facebook and Twitter to lead social change.
One, every successful 'people revolution' need someone like a Martin Luther King Jr., or a Nelson Mandela – a leader with charisma to combine the connected activists into a functioning machine. By their very structure, Facebook and Twitter have no chain of command. There is absolutely no hierarchy, and it is difficult to imagine leaders leading the people who 'Like' their fan pages.

Secondly, there is the question of accountability. For an organisation – and social revolution is something brought about by an organisation – to be effective in bringing about social change, there have to be properly handled tasks assigned to individuals. Be it the American Civil Rights movement or the Boston Tea Party, successful social revolution follows assigned tasks and accountability. This is fundamentally against the very principle of the social networks, whose selling point is being cool, characterised by a single icon on which to click and share. Anything more than navigating three links – the social revolution will trip, tumble and totter.

Networking is fine … but virtual social activism will remain just that … virtual. It brings a complete new meaning to Thomas Jefferson's words : A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.

Cognitive Fallacies of Probability and the Internet

Linda Fallacy. Availability Heuristics. Confirmation Bias.


Well, yes, I am dropping jargon like a consultant, as my new bunch of friends would say.
What I am essentially talking about here are Probabilitistic Cognitive Illusions - a malfunction of the evolution of our cognitive map which makes us prone to make errors when faced with choices involving probability.

Let me start with the Linda Fallacy. Also known as Conjunction Fallacy. The most famous names associated with work related to Psychology of Decisions and Choice,Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, state this as follows:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable?
A) Linda is a bank teller.
B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.


A whopping 85% of people, when asked this question, choose B, although, in Probabilistic terms, the event B is included in the event A and hence has a lower probability. However, human beings are not engineered for proper probabilistic thinking.

Or the celebrated TaxiCab problem:
In another study done by Tversky and Kahneman, subjects were given the following problem:
A cab was involved in a hit and run accident at night. Two cab companies, the Green and the Blue, operate in the city. 85% of the cabs in the city are Green and 15% are Blue.
A witness identified the cab as Blue. The court tested the reliability of the witness under the same circumstances that existed on the night of the accident and concluded that the witness correctly identified each one of the two colors 80% of the time and failed 20% of the time.
What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue rather than Green knowing that this witness identified it as Blue?


Most subjects gave probabilities over 50%, and some gave answers over 80%.

The correct answer, found using Bayes' theorem, is lower than these estimates:
There is a 12% chance (15% times 80%) of the witness correctly identifying a blue cab.
There is a 17% chance (85% times 20%) of the witness incorrectly identifying a green cab as blue.
There is therefore a 29% chance (12% plus 17%) the witness will identify the cab as blue.
This results in a 41% chance (12% divided by 29%) that the cab identified as blue is actually blue.

Whenever the problem turns Bayesian, it is almost impossible for anyone but a trained statistician or mathematical probabilist to think out complicated situations.

And even trained statisticians are fallible, as pointed out by Marilyn von Savant in the famed Monty Hall problem. I am providing this curious problem below:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?


Although not explicitly stated in this version, solutions are almost always based on the additional assumptions that the car is initially equally likely to be behind each door and that the host must open a door showing a goat, must randomly choose which door to open if both hide goats, and must make the offer to switch.

As the player cannot be certain which of the two remaining unopened doors is the winning door, and initially all doors were equally likely, most people assume that each of two remaining closed doors has an equal probability and conclude that switching does not matter; hence the usual answer is "stay with your original door". However, under standard assumptions, the player should switch—doing so doubles the overall probability of winning the car from 1/3 to 2/3.

The Monty Hall problem, in its usual interpretation, is mathematically equivalent to the earlier Three Prisoners problem, and both bear some similarity to the much older Bertrand's box paradox. These and other problems involving unequal distributions of probability are notoriously difficult for people to solve correctly; when the Monty Hall problem appeared in Parade Magazine, approximately 10,000 readers, including nearly 1,000 with PhDs, wrote to the magazine claiming the published solution ("switch!") was wrong. Numerous psychological studies examine how these kinds of problems are perceived. Even when given a completely unambiguous statement of the Monty Hall problem, explanations, simulations, and formal mathematical proofs, many people still meet the correct answer with disbelief.

Why this inability to solve probability problems?

One school of thought is that different events and situations faced men only relatively recently in the history of mankind. Interaction between people and events started to get exponentially complicated with the growth of communities. With small populations, life is simple – the probability space is narrow. If the cave painter is not etching mammoths on the wall (I guess the primitive man also had some way of denoting that they liked whatever was on the wall), he was probably with his woman. That is where probability came to a stop. But, with community growth, cultural exchange, communication methods and complicated networks between an ever expanding group of human beings, there are complicated events to consider, some independent, some dependent, some included and some excluded. Our genes have not kept up with the speed of community building and hence, when we make decisions of choice, we most often go by gut feel rather than probabilistic reasoning. Hence comes into the picture anchoring, bandwagon method, a total lack of understanding of the law of large numbers. In finance, many people blow up because of their gut feel that, after serving them through these various alternatives to probabilistic thinking mentioned above, finally runs out of luck.

And think of the world now, after connections and parameters have taken a completely new meaning, with the advent of the internet and Web 2.0 in the form of social networking. With the human brain not equipped to deal with probability based on events in normal society, how does it fare in the socially networked world, where connections are infinite in the literal sense? Decision making based on the information available to human beings based on all the channels of association in the modern world is in one word – impossible. The brain is just not tuned to work with so many parameters.

And if I suggest that a major reason for the panic that snowballed into the crisis was the socially networked communications, which took away the last rational power of people to make an informed choice, will I be too far from the truth?

Change of Weather

23rd September, 2010 ... Facebook faces technical problems.

Some New Yorkers used the Facebook outage as an opportunity to step away from the computer and enjoy the weather.


"Since facebook went down, I went outside. I forgot how nice September can be. Go outside," tweeted user Broadbandito, who is located in New York.

Change of weather? Clouding of the virtual skies enabling us to switch on the sunlight in our lives?

Strange times.