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From Consumers to Producers - The Indian Story - Part 5 - Social Media

Social Media When Facebook was launched in 2004, I had started teaching in the Department Communication and Journalism, at the University of Mumbai. I remember my first lecture. I was afraid that I would embarrass myself. I had never faced a bunch of 20 youngsters together in my life. But I suppose the lecture went off well, because the then Head of the Department, Dr. Sanjay Ranade, did ask me to continue! My students and I used to communicate with each other using Yahoo Groups, and Orkut. Remember Orkut? I am sure at least some of you do. It was fun, being on Orkut, creating groups, and interacting with so many friends. I know my students used to gossip a lot about the faculty. It was a lot of fun, and the first social media that we really used, apart from the Yahoo Groups, usually for exchange of notes and announcements. We were not used to blogging much. I did start a few blogs, but was never really consistent till I have started writing everyday on this blog for the last 2

From Consumers to Producers - The Indian Story - Part 4 - The Internet

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The Internet I remember, in 1996, in a meeting, a client showed me the Internet. We browsed through Yahoo, one of the most popular websites and search engines at that time. I was amazed that I could just search for any subject and get so much information. I immediately wanted get it on my computer at home, but the only service provider at that time was VSNL - Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited and the cost was Rs.15000 for 100 hours! But very soon, on demand, the rates were brought down to an affordable Rs.1500 per 100 hours of browsing. There was, of course, a catch here. First, you needed to buy an external modem (about Rs.4000/-) and connect it to the phone line to connect to the Internet. There were no schemes or data packages other than the one mentioned. So if you did 100 hours of browsing, it translated to 200 phone calls, which in turn meant a whopping telephone bill. And I did get a bill of about Rs.4000/- which is like getting a bill of about Rs.30000/- now! (Image src:http

From Consumers to Producers - The Indian Story - Part 3 - Storage Devices

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I used to do a lot of graphic designing and make films for various corporates. One day, I went to show the first cut of a film that I had made for an organization. I went with the film to the concerned brand manager, and when he asked me for a CD, and I said I didn't have one, he thought I was joking. I put my hand in the pocket and brought out my brand new pen-drive and said, that his film was in it. Most people in the office thought I had gone crazy, or I had probably hit my head on something. I made him pull out his computer and put the pen-drive in the USB port, and viola! We had the film copied on to his PC in a few minutes! They did not even know the USB port. Of course it was entirely new to everyone including me at that time. But more about pen-drives later. When we speak of storage devices, the first thing we think of is the hard disk drive or the HDD. As I said in my first post in this series, my first PC had a hard disk of a whopping 120 MB and the second one 1.2 GB.

From Consumers to Producers - The Indian Story - Part 2

From Consumers to Producers - The Indian Story - Part 2 I wrote about computers in my last post in this series. Let's look at another technology that evolved along with computers and changed the way we communicate. Still Cameras I remember, when I was in school, we had a box camera, with which we could take black and white photographs. I used it for a long time, at least till 1983. I still have some of those pictures. From 1979 to mid-1980's the price of silver shot up more than 10 times, making silver nitrate, an important ingredient in photographic film and processing very expensive. This in turn, shot up the price of film rolls and photography as a hobby, simply went out of reach of many people. The next camera (Rs.5000) I bought was for my wife the day my son, Tejas was born. December 01, 1994. This one also was a film based camera and by this time, we had colour film commonly available. The first photograph from this camera was of my son, taken by my wife, with me

From Consumers to Producers - The Indian Story - Part 1

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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

Karlo Duniya Mutthi Mein - Part 3

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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

Karlo Duniya Mutthi Mein - Part 2

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

Karlo Duniya Mutthi Mein - Part 1

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

The Colour of Love - Part 2

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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

Media Economics with Mallika Sherawat

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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

Pehli Nazar - Love at First Sight

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

The Colour of Love?

Colour communicates. Period. When I was in college, we did not have these 'days'; traditional day, friendship day, saree day, blue day, or even the Valentine's Day. Quite boring, isn't it? But I have been always intrigued by Valentine's Day. This particular import of western culture has been picked up by the young, commercialized by people selling everything from greeting cards to flowers, then further popularised by the media, by giving full page space to the ads selling these products. I am not going to judgmental about it. You like it, go ahead and celebrate it. Present a red rose to the person you love, or think you love. But is the colour of love RED? Deep down, do you really think so? If the answer is NO, here is probably the reason... We have ben learning about the meanings and psychological effects of colour based on the colour wheel, developed by western philosophers, researchers, and thinkers. However, we have forgotten the Indian context of colours

Why the pessimism?

Should we be really so pessimistic about technology, especially the emerging new media technologies? Communication is a social construct, born out of the need to be able to survive. We, the Homo sapiens, have persisted and survived, and progressed over the past 100,000 years, mainly because we have developed the skill of communicating with each other. What has really changed, is the way we have started communicating. If we overlap timelines of evolution of the present human race and that of evolution of media, media has been around for a miniscule fraction of the time. The problem is that we have simply not been able to really understand this new form of communication. We don't know how to deal with it. We are mesmerized by the moving images, captivated by them, and are unable to distinguish fact from fiction. We develop parasocial relationships with the fictional characters on television. We are addicted to the shows, to the games we play on our play stations, and to the fascin

Power to the Digital Nation

When I leave my College after 6.30 p.m., I usually catch Market Mantra on the All India Radio while driving home. Apart from the happenings in the stock market, experts are called to discuss economy and developmental issues of the country. In one of the broadcasts a few days back, there was an interesting discussion on infrastructure development and the importance of power generation. Though I did not catch the name of the expert, he made some important points. He spoke about how the present government was quite on track in the development of infrastructure, but was quite critical about the issue of power generation. He said that one of the industries that the government was trying to get to invest in India was the electronic industry, more specifically, the companies manufacturing Integrated Circuits, which  are the heart of all electronic goods. To manufacture electronic chips, the plants require uninterrupted power supply. Even a second of interruption can severely affect the qua

"Darling, switch to that advertisement channel please, I want to catch the news in the breaks."

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Any product manufactured, has a life cycle. There is a phase of development and launch, followed by the growth and the maturity phase, leading to decline and then the end. So do media products follow a similar life cycle? If not similar, what kind of life cycle do they follow? Do they have a life cycle at all?  (Image source: http://notesdesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/product-life-cycle-stages-plc.jpg) In this post, lets speak of the economics of news media products. I had a lot of fun when I had presented a paper titled 'The Life-cycle of News'. As soon as I uttered the title, there was a sanctimonious uproar by some members in the audience who actually felt insulted, that I called 'news' a product. Some agreed with what I presented, some did not. I still reiterate - 'news' is a media product. I cannot fathom why some people feel it cannot be so. Interestingly, my friends in the news media agree, but some who 'study' media, don't.

Danger ahead! Don't (re)RUN

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In my last post I wrote about the economics of reality shows. In the same vein, let's explore the economics of re-runs on television.  Some television shows are runaway hits. The only problem is, these shows don't run away; they don't even go away! They keep 'running' on one channel or the other. How many times have your seen Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan?  (Source: http://www.sagartv.com/images/big1005.jpg) And B.R. Chopra's Mahabharat? Whenever any channel buys the rights to a movie, it 'premieres' it. So we see a 'TV Premiere' of the same movie on several channels! The channels also go to the extent of advertising it on radio, newspapers and putting up large hoardings at premier locations for the motorists who drive to office daily. Why do we see these reruns at all? Afterall, audience is always hungry for something new to watch, to enjoy, and to pass time. Well, it's not as simple as that. Television programmers favour

Really? The Economics of Reality Television

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Why do people watch reality shows? Why are they so hooked, mesmerised and addicted to them? Research has shown that some people watch reality because it deals with real people in real-life situations. Some watch simply because they like to see other people in painful, embarrassing and humiliating situations, and enjoy laughing at them. Some people seek catharsis, others seek sensation and seek the pleasure of being openly voyeuristic. The Uses and Gratifications theory states that the audience chooses the programmes that it feels gratified by, and discards or avoids other content in media. The media, in turn, capitalizes on this behaviour and produces reality shows - simply because they sell, and earn the channels the much wanted revenue. But wait... there is also another important thing about these reality shows too. Generally, in a reality show, channels do not have to hire established actors or celebrities (apart from the judges). In many cases, there are no sets other than j

What's so great about media?

What's so great about media? So it's there, omnipresent, when I eat, sleep, drink, play, study, teach, learn...... So what? Well, let's look at it from the Media Economics angle. Like all the other goods, media also produces so many products. TV serials, news, reality shows, and what not. But there is a difference. Suppose I manufacture, say, a watch. Really speaking, I have no connection with you, the consumer. At the most, I will provide you some after-sales service, and p retend that I care a lot about you. But think of this - with due respect to Amir Khan and Ashutosh Gowarikar ...... I produce a Lagaan. When I am making it, I first connect with you with the promos and ads. I also release music and A R Rehman does his magic for me, my revenue earning starts, and my connection with you gets strengthened. Then I release the film, it becomes a hit, and I earn hundreds of crores. You all love me for the film, you also love the characters. You identify yourself wi

Whereto, Media Education?

There is a tendency among many media students to say that they have learnt video editing, just because they know how to use a video editing software, like the Final Cut Pro - FCP as it is called, Adobe Premiere Pro, or one of the many such software. But does that make you an 'Editor'? Frankly, NO. What you become when you learn these software is a button pusher, who is able to line up the raw footage, cut, and move the clips as you want. Maybe you also learn to give some transitions and special effects that are available. You are just a machine operator and NOT an editor. So what makes a good editor? An editor is the one who understands the story, is in complete sync with the director of the movie, and is able to tell the story visually exactly as the director wants, create the director's vision, while contributing and suggesting the shots that are available to the director. An editor is the one who site BEHIND the button pusher, the one on the machine. An editor know

The Digital Divide and Knowledge Gap

The Knowledge Gap Theory was first proposed by Tichenor, Donohue and Olien. The theory states that the capacity to acquire knowledge depends on the access they have to it. People from the higher strata of the society have an advantage of having the means of acquiring knowledge, when they desire to do so, whereas, those in the lower strata of the society fail to acquire knowledge even if they want to. This is simply because they cannot afford to do so. The world is increasingly communicating through digital devices which come at a cost. So if you are in the stratum of society which can afford to buy a digital device, you will be able to communicate better, and in turn, be able to access more content. And if you cannot afford to own a digital divide, you fall in the other stratum. This leads to the society divided into digital have's and have nots -  the Digital Divide. Today students use mobile phones and tablets to compare and share notes, teachers distribute soft copies rathe

Samsung, Apple, et al.

I have a problem. Its a bloody small little big problem. I had decided to present myself a tablet to celebrate my becoming a Doctor in Philosophy and all that. The euphoria of getting the degree is already gone, but I still haven't bought myself a tablet. Now you may wonder what prevents me from doing that? Well here comes my small little big problem.... My expections from a tablet are quite simple. I should be able to do basic editing of Word and Powerpoint documents and I should be able to connect it to an LCD projector. I thought I would be able to just breeze into a store and come out with a tablet of my choice. But no. The Samsung, Apple, Acer, Android, IOS and Windows Gods have ganged up against me. No Samsung tablet can be connected to VGA LCD projector with a single cable. You require one HDMI output cable, to which you attach a HDMI to VGA converter and that too requires a power source. After hunting in the Internet jungle I found no solution which guarantees that this c

Media convergence and communication features in websites of political parties in India

This is the synopsis of my doctoral thesis. I will be uploading my full thesis on my website very soon. Media convergence and communication features in websites of political parties in India Synopsis of the proposed thesis Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Arts of Department of Communication and Journalism University of Mumbai By Mangesh Manohar Karandikar Under the Supervision of Dr. Kiran Thakur Department of Communication and Journalism University of Mumbai   SYNOPSIS Title: Media convergence and communication features in websites of political parties in India Chapter 1: Introduction Communication technology is evolving at a very fast pace since the last two decades. This researcher has been a witness with a very close view of the rapid changes that have taken place in these two decades. He has also been a part of this change, dabbling with the latest graphic designing software, web designing software, Flash animation, client–server prog