Studies in Media

I call myself a successful digital immigrant. Marc Prensky defined Digital Natives as the ones who have been born with digital technology, digital devices, for whom the digital devices is not a new phenomenon, today's young population. Digital Immigrants are those who saw digital technology developing and evolving and adapted to the digital world - people like me! I have been very lucky to have been not only a witness, but a participant in the evolution of the digital age. In this series, I am going to share the story(s) of how several technologies evolved over the last 35 years in India and across the world, slowly but surely turning us, passive consumers of media content, into active producers. How technology - both hardware and software, and skill-sets developed over the years, especially in India, and how it has affected the way we communicate, and hence the way we live and go about our lives. My students (at least the one's who have attended my New Media lectures) mig

The Internet was launched in India in 1995. Interestingly, India's mobile services were also launched in the same year. When I got my first mobile phone in 1997, it was a heavy walkie-talkie like machine, which, had to be held in the hand, for the fear of tearing away my pocket.! The outgoing call rate, when I got my mobile was about Rs.12 outgoing and Rs.6 incoming! We had a second-to-second billing plan too. It used to be very funny, with people making as short a call as possible to avoid hefty phone bills. I remember, I had a client who would ask me if I was calling from my mobile, and if I answered yes, would immediately cut the line and call be back from his landline. It was convenient to own a mobile, and it was also a status symbol, but it was damned expensive. In 2003, Reliance launched its CDMA technology based mobile services, after laying out 80000 kms. of fibre cables across the length and breadth of the country. Everywhere you went, you could see the Reliance work

When I bought my first CD Writer, it cost me a whopping Rs.16000. Again, when I bought my first DVD Writer, it cost me Rs.8000/-. The cost of blank CDs used to be about Rs.125/- when CD Writers came into the hardware market. The blank DVDs used to cost about Rs.50/- for the 4.3 GB capacity. What is a CD or a DVD? A piece of plastic? Today they are cheap, and if you buy in bulk, you may get CDs/DVDs for as low as Rs.5. Then why do the audio and video DVDs and VCDs cost more than a 100 bucks? Since I was in the business of content creation, I do know that it is not the blank CDs or DVDs, but the content that goes into them. I also understand the distress of original content developers when they see their content getting pirated. But more about piracy and media economics in another post on another day. In March 2007, when the MRP of movie CDs and DVDs were above Rs.100 at least, Moser Baer launched 101 film titles. The cost of VCDs was Rs.28, and that of DVDs was Rs.34! This was quit

I was working for a pharmaceutical company and posted as Manager in Ahmedabad for two years - 1989 to 1991. Those days were quite turbulent, one, on my professional front, because I was trying to make inroads into a very tough pharmaceutical market, and second on the political front. Those days were of unrest, and riots during the time of Lalkrishna Advani's Ram Rath Yatra. I saw the horrors of mindless killing, and mob fury first-hand. During Diwali, rarely now, but I still wake up from deep sleep in the middle of the night thinking there is police firing going on somewhere. This was also a period of turmoil in the music industry. In July 1990, the film Aashiqui was released and became a super duper hit. But the credit for its success goes to its music, which was released in 1989 by Gulshan Kumar. This is a story in itself. Coming from a humble background, Gulshan Kumar began his career in the music industry by producing cheap cassettes of music of older hit films. With no cl

What is the colour of love? Red? So when you give a red rose to someone, it communicates your love, right? It's yellow for friendship, and black for hate! Well, here's some food for thought. The festival of Vasant Panchami is celebrated on the fifth day of the Indian month of Magh - or the spring season. Vasant Panchami is celebrated as Goddess Saraswati's birthday. Her statues are dressed in yellow and worshipped. The yellow colour has importance as it is the predominant colour of blooms in nature, especially of the mustard flowers. ("Mustard Fields" by Nitin Das - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mustard_Fields.jpg#/media/File:Mustard_Fields.jpg) Vasant Panchami is also associated with Shingar Rasa, and Kamadev, the God of love and desire, along with his wife, Rati, and friend Vasant . A story from the Puranas says that Lord Shiva burnt Kamadev to ashes for disturbing his penace. Devot

No. I haven't gone crazy. Before you form your first impressions on 'seeing' those words, wait. Do read on before you make any assumptions. Let me continue with what I wrote before. The first glance - pehli nazar is so important, because you tend to immediately form an opinion about someone, or some thing. This has also been researched in the context of websites. A study by Lindgaard in 2006 showed that a visitor could take less than 500 milliseconds to decide whether to stay on a website or simply move on. The more aesthetically pleasing your website is, better the stickiness (tendency of the viewer to remain glued to the website) of the website. So isn't it natural that the sexy, and beautiful Mallika Sherawat's website would not only attract viewers, but also keep them on the website for a longer time? What's that got to do with Media Economics? A LOT, my freinds, a lot. (Picture source: http://www.pinkvilla.com/files/Mallika-Sherawat-6.jpg) Do v

Haven't you ever fallen in love at first sight? With a man or a woman, with a tourist destination, a phone, a dress, a saree, a tie, a shirt, a pair of shoes, a watch? Someone, or something you just saw was made just for you, and you simply had to have it? Well, you are certainly not the first. And the reason you did fall in love at first sight was because of the 'Halo' Effect. Visual communication is a fascinating subject. Every living and non-living thing communicates something or the other. Of course, you need to be able to recognize it. But usually we do, like we form an opinion about a thing when we first see them. Edward Thorndike coined the term 'Halo Effect', a cognitive bias, where we form an impression about a person, a product, or a brand, the moment we see them for the first time. This 'first impression' is quite persistent, and overshadows the judgment about other qualities of that person. Several experiments have been conducted to study