I AM DOING A PH.D. ON “MY FACE BOOK FRIENDS”!
V.S.Gopalakrishnan
(with tongue in cheek)
One has read hundreds and hundreds of books which was a pre-emptive reason to needlessly add one more to it, namely, Facebook! In fact I am in the process of re-reading the books I had read since most of their contents are forgotten. A very important author, I remember, told me, “If you have not read my book, give it a second reading”. This has always puzzled me.
I could have waited for a personal invite from Mark Zuckerberg. He must now be a worried man since the share prices are down despite one billion users. But what made me join Facebook a couple of weeks ago was the fact that one brother started posting my childhood photos in his space and wanted clarification about the details of the venue of the photo, name of the photographer etc. I did have a faint idea of those things notwithstanding that childhood memories are strong and old-age memories are weak!
I posted my profile photo and a cover photo. The profile photo was taken by a nephew and since my face was positioned with strongly streaming sunlight from behind, my age gets nicely covered up. The cover photo is the one taken by me of a ship that got stranded thirteen years ago in front of my house during a storm that affected the Arabian Sea! So you have two drownings there at one go.
Within a day after my enrolment, I went through the FB (Facebook) pages of my relatives. Like the Kauravas we run into hundreds, and that happens in traditional joint families. The surviving children in an average family could be eight to ten but if you reckon natural abortion, post-natal childhood death, fatal accidents etc, each mother could be proud of nearly a dozen deliveries.
I was curious to know what kind of friends my relatives on Facebook had. Each of my relatives had friends in the range of 300 to 1000. I suspected a competition between them. I now come to the point. All this was enough to give me an idea to do a Ph.D.. I enrolled myself immediately with the Mumbai University. I have even already submitted a synopsis, and expect to finish the thesis before 21 Dec 2012 just in case the world would go kaput on that date.
For my thesis I needed to pick parameters, templates, models (I thought of Dia Mirza for a second) etc and be prepared with regression analysis, digression calculus, impression arithmetics, distribution graphs etc.
I started with profile photos. The largest number showed a single face. Next in count were photos with spouse. Then came profile photos of dogs. Then came photos of flowers which meant that the owners were not good looking and did not even have a dog. I built up detailed statistics on these and worked out a working model which can be replicated by others and would have universal application!
The number of friends was directly proportional to the beauty/handsomeness of the FB account-holder. This can be established without any semblance of doubt. I tried to build a universal pattern on this performance platelet.
The “likes” were invariably found to have a higher count than “comments”. The rough proportion came out to be 3:1. This is witness to the situation that people have less time to comment than to like. If the entry is from USA/Europe, the likes to comment ratio can go up to 10:1. I found that In Mongolia and Siberia where people have more time, the like to comment ratio is almost 1:1.
As for the photos posted, the largest relates to holidays and foreign locales. Photos showing cats and dogs and other pets (pythons, rabbits etc) take the second place. Party photos take the third place. Golu photos take the fourth place.
The number of writers on FB that I could access is disappointingly low. The writers (writing outside and not on FB!) mercifully provide a link for easy access for us to read. Writing is a nearly dead human habit, replaced by SMSing . People have basically become photographers, and there are more photos than texts on each account. The photos are usually taken with cell phones and the uploading is so urgently and impatiently done that almost all photographs are dark with little correction for brightness and contrast.
Sometimes it is difficult to say which is the dog and which is the human face in a photo.
My thesis writing is in supersonic momentum thanks to the great sociological puzzles that are so interesting to unravel. I should be publishing the thesis into a book and please be on the look-out for an alert that you would receive from Flipkart soon for free home delivery for a price of Rs.999!
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V.S.Gopalakrishnan
(with tongue in cheek)
One has read hundreds and hundreds of books which was a pre-emptive reason to needlessly add one more to it, namely, Facebook! In fact I am in the process of re-reading the books I had read since most of their contents are forgotten. A very important author, I remember, told me, “If you have not read my book, give it a second reading”. This has always puzzled me.
I could have waited for a personal invite from Mark Zuckerberg. He must now be a worried man since the share prices are down despite one billion users. But what made me join Facebook a couple of weeks ago was the fact that one brother started posting my childhood photos in his space and wanted clarification about the details of the venue of the photo, name of the photographer etc. I did have a faint idea of those things notwithstanding that childhood memories are strong and old-age memories are weak!
I posted my profile photo and a cover photo. The profile photo was taken by a nephew and since my face was positioned with strongly streaming sunlight from behind, my age gets nicely covered up. The cover photo is the one taken by me of a ship that got stranded thirteen years ago in front of my house during a storm that affected the Arabian Sea! So you have two drownings there at one go.
Within a day after my enrolment, I went through the FB (Facebook) pages of my relatives. Like the Kauravas we run into hundreds, and that happens in traditional joint families. The surviving children in an average family could be eight to ten but if you reckon natural abortion, post-natal childhood death, fatal accidents etc, each mother could be proud of nearly a dozen deliveries.
I was curious to know what kind of friends my relatives on Facebook had. Each of my relatives had friends in the range of 300 to 1000. I suspected a competition between them. I now come to the point. All this was enough to give me an idea to do a Ph.D.. I enrolled myself immediately with the Mumbai University. I have even already submitted a synopsis, and expect to finish the thesis before 21 Dec 2012 just in case the world would go kaput on that date.
For my thesis I needed to pick parameters, templates, models (I thought of Dia Mirza for a second) etc and be prepared with regression analysis, digression calculus, impression arithmetics, distribution graphs etc.
I started with profile photos. The largest number showed a single face. Next in count were photos with spouse. Then came profile photos of dogs. Then came photos of flowers which meant that the owners were not good looking and did not even have a dog. I built up detailed statistics on these and worked out a working model which can be replicated by others and would have universal application!
The number of friends was directly proportional to the beauty/handsomeness of the FB account-holder. This can be established without any semblance of doubt. I tried to build a universal pattern on this performance platelet.
The “likes” were invariably found to have a higher count than “comments”. The rough proportion came out to be 3:1. This is witness to the situation that people have less time to comment than to like. If the entry is from USA/Europe, the likes to comment ratio can go up to 10:1. I found that In Mongolia and Siberia where people have more time, the like to comment ratio is almost 1:1.
As for the photos posted, the largest relates to holidays and foreign locales. Photos showing cats and dogs and other pets (pythons, rabbits etc) take the second place. Party photos take the third place. Golu photos take the fourth place.
The number of writers on FB that I could access is disappointingly low. The writers (writing outside and not on FB!) mercifully provide a link for easy access for us to read. Writing is a nearly dead human habit, replaced by SMSing . People have basically become photographers, and there are more photos than texts on each account. The photos are usually taken with cell phones and the uploading is so urgently and impatiently done that almost all photographs are dark with little correction for brightness and contrast.
Sometimes it is difficult to say which is the dog and which is the human face in a photo.
My thesis writing is in supersonic momentum thanks to the great sociological puzzles that are so interesting to unravel. I should be publishing the thesis into a book and please be on the look-out for an alert that you would receive from Flipkart soon for free home delivery for a price of Rs.999!
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