Bully for you!

How to deal with the hotbed of hatred that goes by the name of the Internet

Cyber bullying has been much in the news of late. And it spawned a fresh set of stories after the wife of the Republican contender for the US Presidency, Melania Trump, gave a robotic stump speech to announce that she would work on combatting cyber bullying if she ever became First Lady. Once we had stopped pointing and laughing -- and asking her if she had ever met her husband, the Insulter-In-Chief, Donald Trump -- it was difficult to disagree with the substance of what Melania said.

You only have to spend ten minutes on the Internet to realise what a hotbed of hatred it has become. Clearly the anonymity that the net offers does something strange to people. It brings forth their worst instincts. It encourages them to spew abuse and insults from their safe havens in front of their keyboards. It turns otherwise rational and sane human beings into a raging mob spitting expletives and vomiting bile. It makes them think nothing of throwing stuff at you that they would never dream of saying to your face.

So, yes, Melania had it right when she spoke about how "We have to find a better way to talk to one another, to disagree with each other, to respect each other."

But she is quite the wrong messenger to put out this message. After all, every night she lies down to sleep beside Donald Trump, who is prone to go on vicious tweet storms in the early hours of the morning, asking people to check out (non-existent) sex tapes of former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado. So if Melania really wants to fight cyber bullying then she should start with the bully snoring gently next to her. Confiscating his phone and deleting his Twitter account would be a good start.

But I am guessing that is not going to happen any time soon. And even if we try and take comfort in the hope that after November 8 we won't have to bother very much about what Donald Trump has to say (am writing this before America goes to the polls, so knock wood) cyber bullying will still be a clear and present danger.

Like most women who have an online presence I have been subjected to my fair share of cyber bullying over the years. The abuses remained much the same. They were always some variation on calling me a 'prostitute', wishing that I would be 'raped' (except that I was too unattractive for any man to bother), calling me fat or ugly (or both), ah well, you get the drift. But over time my way of coping with the steady stream of vitriol did evolve and change.

My initial response to all the sexist abuse on such platforms as Twitter was to hit back hard. I would reply to every abusive tweet and tie myself up in futile exchanges that did nothing other than exasperate, infuriate, and even debilitate me. After a few months of this, I realised that what they say about wrestling with pigs is true: you both get dirty but only the pig enjoys it.

All I was really doing with my instant responses and cutting repartee was feeding the beast. I was just encouraging bad behaviour instead of cutting it off. I was giving cyber bullies the space to function and thrive instead of cutting off their oxygen supply.

So, I decided to change tack. Now, instead of replying to these angry cyber warriors I would just draw attention to their illiterate rants in a suitably high-minded manner. Thus began a brief phase when I would retweet the most vile tweets with a pithy comment like "Your mother would be so proud of you". The hope was to name and shame the most vicious offenders so that they thought twice about using language like this again.

I know, silly me. What was I thinking? All I did achieve by retweeting the messages of these trolls, who sometimes had less than a hundred followers, was allow them access to a larger audience on my timeline. And boy, did they revel in the attention this got them!

It was time to roll out another strategy -- and this one has served me well to this day. It's called Zero Tolerance. I block anyone who is abusive towards me. I block those who bully and abuse others. I block those who spout communal nonsense on my timeline. I block those who retweet this kind of nonsense. It is an endless process; block a dozen trolls and a hundred others spring forth to take their place. But despite the occasional moments of despair, I keep at it.

Is it a viable solution to cyber bullying? Of course not. But it is a good start to keeping cyber bullies out of my space. My logic is simple: I would not tolerate this kind of behaviour from people in real life; so why should I tolerate it on the Net? Anyone who behaved like that in my home would not be invited back. So, why would I allow such louts on my timeline, which is my virtual drawing room?

Which is why I don't have much use for Melania Trump's claims of combatting cyber bullying. If she can't deal with the bully in her bed, what hope is there for her taking on those hiding in the dark shadows of the Net?

Eom

Internet Addiction?

Oh yes, that’s a thing now; and what’s more, the Internet will help you beat it!

So, it is finally here. The cure to Internet addiction. Okay, maybe I exaggerate. But it may well be around the corner. A hospital in Pennsylvania has become the first to offer an inpatient detox programme for those who are suffering from an addiction to the Internet. Starting this week, the Bradford Regional Medical Center will offer a 10-day programme devised by experts in others forms of addiction. Those who sign up will be given classes in digital detox and will participate in group therapy sessions much like those addicted to alcohol, drugs or even sex, do.

Some medical experts, of course, insist that there is no such thing as Internet addiction. Some people are over-dependent on the use of digital technology and social media (same difference, if you ask me) and may need intervention to disengage from the virtual world. But calling this an addiction is over-egging it a bit.

Whatever you may call it, however, there is no denying that too many of us have become obsessive about our use of the Internet. We are constantly dipping into social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram to check out what’s happening with the world and to tell the world what’s happening with us. We can’t eat a meal without first taking a picture and sharing it with all our virtual friends. We can’t go on holiday without documenting every single moment on social media. Hell, we even live-tweet miscarriages, births and (more creepily) deaths.

And such is our obsessive desire to remain updated and plugged in that we can ever disengage and just enjoy the moment. We take videos of live concerts rather than immerse ourselves in the music. We take pictures of a beautiful sunset instead of letting its beauty wash over us. We spend all our time on our smartphones when we should be engaging with the real-life people around us.

In such technology-driven societies like Japan, it is estimated that as many as half a million children in the age group of 12 to 18 are addicted to the Internet. So serious is the situation that the ministry of education has started ‘fasting camps’ to help these kids disconnect from their digital devices. These camps are held outdoors where the children (after their touchscreens are wrestled away from them presumably) are made to interact with one another, play games, participate in team sports, have conversations and group discussions. Or, in other words, experience those childhood joys that we took for granted growing up in a pre-Internet world.

That’s not to say, though, that only kids who were born into the new technology age have a problem disconnecting from the virtual world. Even ‘grown-ups’, who really should know better, find themselves wasting time in ever more inventive ways on the Internet. The office worker who has Facebook open in a side window as he replies to emails. The journalist who can’t stay off Twitter even if she is on a deadline. The young mother who joins chat groups to escape the isolation of being housebound with a baby and ends up hooked.

And these are just the benevolent ways of wasting time on the Internet. There is a dark, malevolent side to the Internet too as those who get addicted to gaming or gambling sites know all too well. And then, there’s the whole murky world of cybersex and on-line porn. But given that this is a family publication, we will draw a discreet veil over that.

So, why do we all get so hooked on the digital world even though we know at a rational level that it is doing us no good? And that we really should be getting some work done instead?

Well, psychologists say that we get a high from the anonymity that the Internet grants us, allowing us to be whatever and whoever we want. And that we get a sense of self-validation when we engage with people in the virtual world; especially if we feel isolated in the real world.

Which is, perhaps, why people who work from home are more susceptible to digital addiction. There you are, sitting alone at your desk, staring at a computer when a ping tells you that you have received a tweet, email or even a Facebook update. The temptation to click on the link is too hard to resist. You decide to take a little peek. And before you know it, you’ve wasted an hour and a half of your life that you are never getting back.

I felt a little better about my own digital addiction when I read that Monica Ali, of Brick Lane fame, had written about her gratitude to Self-control and Freedom in the foreword to her new book. Yes, I use upper case advisedly. These are the names of the apps that you can download to treat your Internet addiction. Self-control and Freedom allow you to set up a period of time – say three hours – when your browser will behave as if you are offline, allowing you to concentrate on your work without any distractions. If that’s too hardcore for you, there are apps like Anti-Social (a kind of Freedom-lite) that allows you to block off those social media sites on which you waste most time.

Yes, I know, using Internet apps to treat Internet addiction; the irony doesn’t escape me either. There has to be an easier way, right? There is actually. It’s called self-control, with a small s this time. We really should give it a try.

Ho, Ho, Ho

What I would like Santa to get me for Christmas...

Sometimes I wonder just how stupid we were as kids to actually believe in Santa Claus. Wasn’t it obvious that the fat Indian man (who looked suspiciously like Uncle Chatterjee from next door) with the fake white beard couldn’t possibly have travelled down from the North Pole in his reindeer-driven sleigh? Did we ever stop to think why every shop we visited while Christmas shopping had a Santa Claus who looked completely different from the one before? Or did we just wilfully ignore all these alarm bells because we needed to live in a world where Santa came around annually bearing gifts that we had longed for the entire year.

I like to think it was the latter. And so, in the same child-like spirit, I decided to compile a list of all the things that I would like Santa to bring me this year. So here it is: my own Christmas wish list (in no particular order of importance)

* A longer attention span. I’d like to revert to the days when I could watch a movie without feeling tempted to tweet my views about it half an hour into the show. I’d like to read a book with stopping to dip into Facebook to see what my friends are up to. And I’d really like to be able to finish my writing without breaking off every 15 minutes to ‘research’ something on the Net.

* An internet connection that times out automatically. I often wonder how people procrastinated in the days before the Internet was invented. How did they waste time before the Google search engine came along? And by ‘people’, of course, I mean myself. I have lost count of the number of hours I have wasted on news sites, on following threads that lead me into the darker corners of the Net, and looking through picture albums of people I barely know. And given my complete and utter lack of self-discipline, the only thing that will free me is a net connection that turns itself off when I am unable to do so. 

* High heels that I can walk in without throwing out my back, crippling my knees, and mutilating my feet. Yes, I know every woman always insists that her stilettos are comfortable enough to run in; but believe me, she lies. The pair of high heels – and I mean really high heels – that both look and feel good are yet to be invented. Which is why I am pinning my hopes on Santa.

* A machine that exercises all my muscle groups for me. Come on, admit it. You’d like one too. Just imagine the joy of lying supine, reading a book or listening to music, strapped to a contraption that stretches your hamstrings, tones up your abdomen, tightens your bum, and elongates your legs, without your ever having to make any effort whatsoever. Bliss!

* A new neck: Yes, this one has given me great service for many decades but truth be told, it is beginning to look a bit tired now. So tired, that it can barely keep my double chins in place. (And if I am wishing for things, how about a brand-new jaw-line as well, all taut and jowl-free? And all the hair I have lost since my 20s, in its original black colour.)

* A magic carpet that whisks me away to Venice every January. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Why January? Isn’t it cold as hell? And raining? And flooding, thanks to the acqua alta? Yes, right on all counts. And yet, that is the month that Venice appears most magical to me. There are no hordes of tourists jostling you aside in Piazza San Marco. The streets are deserted so that you can actually gaze on undisturbed at the many architectural gems carelessly displayed on them. And the hotel rates are, relatively at least, affordable.

* A device that wipes my memory clean of all my favourite books so that I can discover them anew. I can still remember the joy I felt when I read my first Elizabeth George or Donna Leon. I had to restrain myself from calling up all my friends late at night and sharing my discovery with them. It’s been a long time since I felt that way about a book (the last time was when I devoured Hilary Mantel’s marvellous Wolf Hall in one big gulp) and I miss that slow burn of excitement that comes with stumbling upon a bright new literary star.

* A time machine to whisk me back to my college classroom. All those great writers and poets I read then in my English literature course – William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, John Donne, T.S. Eliot – would make so much more sense to me now that I have lived a little.

In the blink of an eye

That’s how long it takes for us to lose interest while surfing on the net – and increasingly, in real life

If you are as old as I am, you probably remember a time when you actually had to dial-up an Internet connection. Sometimes it took two minutes; sometimes it took ten; and sometimes it didn’t work at all. When you finally connected, every site took ages to open up, and then just as you were finally getting into it, the connection would magically disappear. So then you had to dial-up again...and again.

I remember spending entire afternoons at my desk, just waiting to first get through and then finish my research. Over time I got canny enough to arm myself with a magazine to while away the time spent waiting. Sometimes, just to mix it up, I would buff my nails; call a friend for a chat; eat a sandwich; even do my stretching exercises. (Okay, I made up the last one; but the rest of it is true.)

In case you’re wondering why I am blubbering on about the bad old days of internet connectivity, my nostalgia was triggered by a recent news report that said that people will visit a website less often if it is slower than its competitor by more than 250 milliseconds. What is 250 milliseconds in peoplespeak? Well, it translates as the blink of an eye.

So, if a website is slower than its rival by even a blink of an eye, we will abandon it in favour of the faster one. As Arvind Jain, the resident speed maestro at Google says, “Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait. Every second counts.” Or, more accurately, every nano-second. Harry Shum, speed specialist at Microsoft agrees, “250 milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the web.”

And no doubt with time, we will only get more demanding. As recently as 2009, a study by Forrester Research found that online shoppers wanted pages to load in two seconds or less. The moment you hit the three second mark, a large percentage would simply abandon the site and move on. Just three years earlier, however, a similar study had found that the average expectation for page load time was four seconds or less. So, with every year, our desire for speed, well, speeds up even more.

But if you ask me, this is not simply about our impatience while surfing the net. In a sense, this report is a metaphor for our times. We want it all, and we want it now. And by that I mean NOW, not 250 milliseconds later! Okay?

Ours is not a generation that sees any virtue in delayed gratification. And the generation after ours, which has been weaned on smartphones and grown up on Ipads, is going to be even less patient. Soon the 250 millisecond mark will be whittled down to 150 milliseconds, then 50 milliseconds – until a time comes when we will want the page to load intuitively even before we have clicked on it.

We can already see the signs. Everyone is always in a hurry. In a hurry to grow up; in a hurry to hit the fast lane; in a hurry to get rich; in a hurry to get into shape; in a hurry to be famous; in a hurry to retire; in a hurry to...well, you get the drift.

And of course, everyone is in a hurry when on the net. What, 250 milliseconds too slow? Bam, you’re dead.

Sadly, this impatience has percolated into every area of our lives. You see it in the professional sphere all the time. No one wants to stay in the same job for too long for fear of stagnating. They want to move on and up – and on yet again, even if the raise offered is a few thousand rupees. The idea of staying on and working for the same firm – like the company-men of an earlier generation – is anathema to anyone under the age of 30.

Or let’s look closer home. Children, these days, seem to be in a tearing hurry to grow up. The teenage years appear to start at 10 rather than 13; they are dating at 12 rather than 16; and they seem to know more about sex at 15 than we did ten years later.

Personal gratification is another area where our expectations have speeded up. Want to lose weight? Yes. But who has the time or inclination to do the old-fashioned way: by eating less and working out more. That would just mean losing a kilo a week, duh! That’s simply not fast enough.

So bring on the fad diets, the slim cures, the week-long fasts, the plant juice detox. Instead of taking a long-term view, look for the quick fix. Check into a fat farm, a body boot camp, or a yoga retreat for a week or so. And if none of that works, well then a little bit of liposuction never hurt anyone – and you’ll be home before lunch to snack on some fast food.

Ah food! Cooking is becoming a lost art because few people have the patience to rustle up a home-made meal from scratch. And eating out in a restaurant has become like a race against time. I want my menu now. Bring the bread to the table already. What’s with the ten-minute delay between courses? Of course, I don’t want the soufflé; it takes 25 minutes!

You do realise that I don’t have even 250 milliseconds to spare, don’t you?.

Attention, please!

When there are so many distractions available at the click of a mouse, can you stop your mind from wandering?

Over the last few months, I have been trying to work on a new book, a racy thriller that I hope will turn out to be a page-turner (not to mention, a bestseller!). But the operative word in the last sentence is: ‘trying’. Yes, that’s right. I am trying – very hard indeed – to write a book. But I’m sorry to report, I am not getting very far.

And it’s all the fault of that scourge of our times: the Internet.

No, seriously, if it wasn’t for the distractions available at the click of a mouse, I would be half-way through my opus by now. I have written the first chapter, which is always the trickiest. I have the plot more or less worked out. I have plenty of thoughts on the twists and turns I could throw in to surprise the reader. I have the gleamings of a cracker of a climax in my head. And by now, I know my main characters almost as well as I do some of my best friends.

And yet, the writing is not going very well.

Of course I carry some blame for that, for being an undisciplined so-and-so who can’t keep to her self-imposed deadline of at least 500 words a day. But truth be told, most of the blame rests on my laptop, which is connected to my wifi network, and keeps throwing up interesting little nuggets when I am trying to work.

Suddenly an icon pops up telling me that a friend wants to chat on Gmail. Now, if she were to call me on the phone at that juncture I would probably not even notice (my mobile is nearly always on silent) let alone take her call. But there is no ignoring her on my laptop. The icon blinks on and on and I can’t keep my eyes off it.

Finally the temptation gets too hard to resist. Who knows what choice piece of information she may have to offer? What if she needs to discuss something urgent? The questions whirl around in my head until I concede defeat, close my word document, and press ‘Yes’ on that icon.

Of course, nine times out of ten she is just looking for a good gossip in the middle of the workday. And by the time the two of us have finished instant messaging the news of the week, a good half hour has passed. And so has the mood to work on my novel.

If it isn’t instant messaging on Gmail, it’s Facebook alerts that pop up to provide instant distraction. Yet another friend has a ‘Recent Status Update’ that he would like to share with me. Another has sent a private message with such an intriguing tagline that it is impossible to ignore. And then, there’s that link to a piece in the Guardian. Would it really be so bad to have a quick read before I resume work?

Of course, it would. Because when it comes to surfing the newspapers, there really is no end to it as far as I am concerned. I click on a link about Obama’s state visit to India, get distracted by a strap line that talks about the forthcoming royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton (or Catherine, as we are all apparently now meant to call her). From there it’s one easy click to an article about Princess Diana and how she may well overshadow her daughter-in-law even from the great beyond. And so it goes, until all thoughts of my book have been chased from my head, which is now filled with conspiracy theories about the Princess’ death in a car crash.

And then, there’s my new toy: Twitter. No, I don’t really tweet that much, mostly because I have nothing to say. But I do get a tad curious if I get an alert about someone having tweeted to me. I sign in to check what that’s about, quickly type out my replies, and then get waylaid by what everyone else is twittering on about. It’s not long before I have been inveigled into a conversation or two with my Twitter friends, or, as is more likely, have gotten into an argument that takes up so much of my mind space that there’s no longer any room for novel-writing in it.

I guess this is an unavoidable fall-out of the Age of Information that we live in, surrounded by so many social media networks that we find ourselves quite lost in all that babble. And given this constant flitting between different things, it’s no wonder that our attention spans are shot to hell.

Well, at least I know that mine is. With all this instant messaging, twittering, Googling and what have you, I find it harder and harder to concentrate on any one subject. In fact, given the level of my distraction, it’s a wonder how I manage to get any work done at all.

Which is why I’m making a resolution even before the New Year rolls in. From now on, I am going to restrict my use of the Internet to two hours a day, judiciously spaced out over a 24-hour period. Who knows, with a bit of luck, I may even get down to finishing that book.

(Full disclosure: in the course of writing this column, I logged on to Twitter, answered a couple of emails, and did a quick Internet search for Kate Middleton and Princess Diana.)

The Google trap

The search engine has come to rule our lives

One of my friends, who is in the luxury business, spends about half his time on the road, living out of suitcases in some glitzy hotel or the other. It sounds glamorous, I know, but he maintains that it’s not what it’s cracked up to be. His entire time goes in meetings, the cities pass by in a blur and most time he has no idea where he is on that particular day.

But after a hard day at work, he likes to reward himself with a nice dinner in a fancy restaurant – you know the kind that you can’t get into for love or money. So, how does he manage to land a reservation nine times out of ten?

Simple. He calls up, leaves his name and his booking request, and asks the staff to Google him. He has found that once they log that he is a luxury hot-shot, there is no trouble getting the best table in the house, even at a day’s notice.

It’s a great strategy, of course, but it wouldn’t necessarily work for all of us. After all, not everyone’s name throws up many thousands of hits in a Google search. And how do we know this? Because at one time or another, every one of us have given in to the shameless impulse to Google ourselves.

Such is the popularity of this little recreational activity that Google is probably one of the few companies since Hoover whose name has become a verb in the English language. We use it almost unconsciously when we want to search for something on the Internet. It could be something as innocuous as the latest gossip on Angeline Jolie or Brad Pitt or something as important as doing a background search on someone who has applied for a job. Whatever we want to know about whichever subject, we simple Google it.

There’s even a phrase that’s evolved to describe those of us who are so dependent on Google for all our research. Old-fashioned academics – you know the kinds who actually read books and spend time in libraries painstakingly looking up references – have dubbed us the White Bread Generation. The phrase was coined by media studies professor Tara Brabazon in the UK, who bans her own students from using Google because it is like white bread: filling but without any nutritional content.

Academics like Brabazon fear that most students these days don’t bother with doing any reading at all (unless it is on the Internet). They have probably never set foot in a library. All their research is conducted on the net. Google is their weapon of choice and Wikipedia their Holy Grail, the fount of all wisdom.

It doesn’t matter to the WBG that most Wikipedia entries are written and re-written and then re-re-written by people who are not necessarily the best minds in the business. It is of no consequence to them that some of the information regurgitated by Google is suspect at best and wrong at worst.

No, as far as they are concerned, if you can Google it, then it must be true. So the term White Bread seems particularly apt – for the generation that is not interested in the meat of the matter.

Journalists like me are perhaps more guilty than most. For most of us, Google has become synonymous with research. And this means that once an erroneous bit of information has been fed through Google, it takes on a life of its own, being repeated over and over again until it begins to acquire a certain authenticity. As the old Nazi saying goes, if you repeat a lie often enough, it begins to seem like the truth.

Which perhaps goes some way in explaining why Google has become so important in our lives. We know that it will be the first port of call when anyone wants to find out anything about us. So, we try and make sure that all the Google entries about us can pass muster if they are being read by putative partners (romantic and otherwise), potential employers or just friends and family.

Only there’s no good way to do that. Once someone has written anything about you and posted it on the net, well then you can be sure it’s going to pop up forever more every time someone types your name into the search engine.

All you can really do is control the kind of information you put out about yourself. We’ve all heard nightmare stories about people being fired because their Facebook photos showed them doing drugs or because they were blogging about their bosses and places and work. And all of it was duly flagged up on Google because they never really understood how the privacy settings work. Remember the newly-appointed MI6 chief in the UK, Sir John Sawers, who nearly lost his job because his wife posted pictures of their house and kids on Facebook for the world to see.

See, when it comes to Google, a little discretion goes a long way. Except for us journos, who simply have to live with the fact that nothing we write today will be forgotten tomorrow. No, it will live on forever in cyberspace, coming right back up (in Google searches) to bite us in the butt.