Tag: social media

Man falls dead. Just third day in office.

Look at the image. Don’t get shocked. The man is alive and kicking. 

All he did was take a nap in the office on the third day of joining duty as an intern. That gave an opportunity for his colleagues to gang up on him, take a selfie and post the picture on social media as a huge prank. And the photo is now viral. Sad!

The poor man’s name was Eduard. He had just joined a software company called GSoft based in Canada. 

It was in the year 2016 and the man says the show isn’t over yet.

The Deceased Man’s Prank Photo keeps doing rounds on social media. But Eduard is just loving it.

The Huffington Post has got more to say about this funny story. Read on. Click the link.

https://www.huffpost.com

Social Media; Both Sides of Story.

How do you use social media?

I, too, am one of the many million who use social media for the purpose of connecting with people, reading news, listening to music and keeping abreast of what’s going on around the world.

I use it more for the purpose of knowing facts and fakes.

Social media provide me with both sides of a story. Sometimes multiple sides, perhaps. Much like how astronauts see the beauty of the Earth from the sky too far away, located in geostationary orbit. 

As a writer, I find that a boon.

Memes on SM walls win polls in India.

It’s election time, as you all know. 

When you walk in the street and happen to look at a poster (no walls are wasted, all pasted!) on the wall which has an image of the actor, director and producer Sandhana Bharathi, but the message is about Indian HM Amit Shah, you have just seen a good meme. That makes everyone laugh.

A meme is a humorous and satirical way of conveying a message or an idea into an easily translatable format. 

Social media nowadays are awash with memes. Images, videos and GIFs have all got memes as content.

Do you know how old a meme is?

The meme is as old as 1953, when the New York Times used the word in a Crossword Puzzle. The clue was; “Same:French.” (The term has a French origin).

It appeared again on the crossword in 2021, with the clue now hinting; “something that gets passed around a lot”. 

People share memes on social media and good memes can go viral in a second.

The British evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins was the first to use the term in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene.”

He said in his book that he needed a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.

He was actually talking about genes replicating through generations.

He wanted a name that sounded like “gene.”  And that was how the word ‘meme’ was born.

People live in a fast-paced social media world. They have little time for reading and images in the form of memes help positively influence people’s minds.

Memes form part of today’s marketing content too. Products sell faster through memes.

The popular meme creator who has a three million following on Instagram, Saint Hoax says memes are basically editorial cartoons for the internet age.

“Messages in a meme format catch your eye, and most of them can be read and understood within seconds,” says Samir Mezrahi, the deputy director of social media at BuzzFeed.

But there’s a flip side to a meme.

Some of them might just negatively impact your business and make your potential customers think twice before buying your services.

So be cautious when creating a meme and try rolling it out for circulation on social media.

When did ‘Whats Up?’ become a WhatsApp since?

How has technology changed your job?

When we studied Mass Communication and Journalism in the late 80s, many of us wanted to work in print, on the radio or assist cinema directors.

The copywriter’s job didn’t pay very much. They gave us copies to write about ₹200 ($2) worth of di-pole television antennas. Disgusting!

Television hit India big in the mid 90s. A lot of us could find jobs in the news and entertainment television. The job paid us well.

We were just about halfway through mastering the analogue format of broadcasting and the digital world hit us blind.

4:3 (aspect ratio) gave way to 16:9. All in a blink. Star Group’s Channel V was a rage among the younger music-loving audience. People watched MTV-grind till late at home.

Tapes were gone and we carried large disks. Digitization was a jiffy. Edit at a low resolution and make the master copy in high-res. Multi-layering helped insert cut-away shots quickly. Broadcasting soon became 24/7.

Social media came like a deluge. That hit us big. We were threatened with job losses at Y2K. We sat clueless many times.

Machines have become smaller and one machine (Fire, Flint and Finalcut Pros) did it all. From scripting, sequencing, digitizing, editing, keying, GFX, sound-mixing, titles and mastering. All from the word GO!

The cameras have a lot of pixels to offer. Technicians shot many episodes on a given day.

Citizens journalism is the new kid in town. Thanks to an explosion called YouTube.

The tool for shooting a film sequence is now just a phone. A smartphone is your pocket broadcaster. All credit to technology. 

Amateurish pan-shots. Bad cuts. Jump videos. Poor quality soundbites. No ‘rule of third’ in the composition. Long boring stories. Unethical content. No age-appropriate certificate.

And the greater casualty is the watershed at 9pm was gone. Anyone can watch anything, anytime.

YouTube has become the broadcaster’s market for cheap goods. Made in China.

The ‘cheaper a dozen’ market now has around 2.6 billion (about 250 crore) active users per month.

More than 114 million (about 12 crore) active channels.

People upload 2,500 new videos every minute and more than 150,000 videos are available on your phone every hour. There’s no stopping a video on YouTube.

The last time we heard about an assembly line of a product was when Henry Ford made cars.

Such is the scale of spoil in the mind of an avid video-watching kid.

Ryan Kaji is a nine-year-old boy from Texas. He has over 29 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, Ryan’s World. In 2020, Kaji earned nearly $30 (about ₹3 crores) million from his channel. All he does is review toys for kids.

We lost the race a long time ago, thanks to the arrival of technology. IMHO!

PS: Today I could sit and ask an AI (ChatGPT) to write a brief about how technology affected an editor’s or a news producer’s job in the television industry. But, why?

This is the only time I could give the AI some rest and do a job that’s genuinely mine. So I’ve chosen to write one myself.

Thanks for reading.