Guest Post - Deer, Predators, and Information Overload

Sriram Subramanian

About the author :Sriram Subramanian is a Chemical Engineer from IIT Roorkee and an MBA from IIM Calcutta. After a decade working in management consulting and corporate, Sriram founded Mind Matters in 2006, which is today one of India’s leading corporate training firms.  Throughout his career,Sriram has juggled multiple interests, including reading, writing, music, travel, sports and parenting. 

Sriram’s writing pursuits started at the age of six, when he faithfully wrote weekly letters to his mother (an English teacher); she marked them for grammar, punctuation, spelling and sentence construction in red ink. His favorite authors include  Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Dostoevsky, The Bronte sisters, John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka, PG Wodehouse, Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry.You can reach him here.

His debut novel can be bought here. The cover is so awesome that I couldn't help sharing it.

Deer, Predators, and Information Overload
Sriram Subramanian

I’m a nut about structuring.

Specifically, organizing one’s thoughts and ideas logically—grouping, classifying and categorizing—before putting those ideas out in any form of communication, written or verbal. The concept is very simple—when a writer (or speaker) structures his thoughts, the reader (or listener) gets the message with the minimum of effort. Further, there is little scope for ambiguity—different readers won’t go away with different conclusions. The reverse is true when the writer just puts his thoughts out as they occur to him, which is usually in an unorganized dump. (That’s my day job, by the way…training people on stuff like this.)

I’d once written an article on this subject (in a blog, now sadly only accessible to our overlords in Google) and it generated some debate. One responder suggested that with the advent of real time communication technology (e-mail, SMSs, WhatsApp and so on), the cost of not ordering thoughts was minimized. If the writer missed something, or was unclear, the reader could simply request and receive a clarification, at virtually zero cost / effort.

This article is a response to that line of thought, which seems to be quite prevalent (and popular) today.

Yann Martel, the Booker-Prize-winning author of the Life of Pi (of course, there’s a literary connection!) suggested an outline of a fascinating analogy in an interview many years back and it stuck in my mind. Subsequently it seems to have vanished from the public domain (Googling yields no results at all). Based onmy visit to the Serengeti some years ago, I have taken the liberty of embellishing the original with my limited additional knowledge of the behavior of antelopes. So here goes…

Imagine a deer (say a Thomson’s gazelle) in the grassland. As far as his eye can see, the land is flat; the plains endless, interrupted only now and then by a line of short, stunted bushes, or the occasional baobab. He grazes contentedly, though always with his ears cocked up and his nose on high alert, ready to respond to the slightest hint of danger. Now, there are lots of predators on the same grassland – lion, cheetah, leopards and hyena. How does the deer survive? With the exception of the cheetah, the deer can actually outrun them all over a reasonable distance, given his low body weight. However, all these predators are capable of powerful bursts of acceleration, which make them faster over a short sprint.

The deer’s survival mechanism is a very simple one. At any point, the deer maintains a ‘circle of safety’ with respect to any predator. Imagine the deer at the center of the circle. His signal reception mechanisms (power of hearing, ability to detect predator scents and strange vibrations in the ground) have over millennia been synchronized with the safe radius. His signal reception limits equate with the minimum distance he needs to maintain to outrun a predator. If a lion moves into this circle, the deer is able to pick up the signal, process it (checking if it is a harmless or a dangerous signal), recognize the danger and take corresponding action. The usual response would be to move away by a similar distance, so as to maintain the safe distance. Any closer, and the lion would get him because of his short-sprint advantage.

(As an aside, lions counter this by hunting in pairs or threes, usually one lying hidden in the bush, while the others approach from the opposite end to nudge the deer in the direction of the one lying in wait. The reverse counter is provided by deer staying in herds—their effective radius increases, and they seek safety in numbers—statistically their chances of individual survival go up, though the lions would always get one or two, each time)

Now imagine this deer suddenly has access to modern communication technology. Say someone clamps a pair of headphones or RF antennae on the deer, so that now, magically, the deer can pick up signals at twice the original radius. Theoretically, this should be good for the deer, because there might have been some instances when a deer’s signal detection radius proved limiting (and fatal!)—say there was an unusually fast lion just outside the original circle. With better technology, the deer should be able to react at much greater distances.

What do you think will happen?

What will most likely happen is that the deer would go nuts.

Earlier, the deer would ignore all signals outside the circle, good or bad. Now the deer would go this way and that, as he responds to each movement of a predator outside the original circle, even if most of these movements pose no incremental danger to him. He would probably fall down out of sheer exhaustion. Not a moment’s peace left.Unless of course, the reception technology was combined with additional information processing capability—i.e. the deer also had double the brain he does, which he doesn’t.

The point is this—as humans, there are physical limits to the amount of signals / information we can deal with, without going nuts. The explosion in the last two decades is seriously worrying—on an average day, we watch TV, read news, check FB multiple times, respond to every WhatsApp ping (and boy is that irritating), get Twitter feeds, check out Instagrams, get SMSs, respond to so many calls, get office mails everywhere, anyplace, anytime. Our reactions are not dissimilar to the hypothetical deer.

Imagine you and your friend agreed to catch a movie at the theater just 20 years back, when there were no cellphones. (Sorry, millennials—you’ll just have to imagine this world. Think it’s Westeros, for instance) Presumably you would have agreed to meet outside the ticketing office, say 15 minutes before the start. If one of you got delayed, the other would have a coffee, watch the crowd, look at the posters or queue up to get tickets. Basically, wait patiently. And you know what, 9 out of 10 your friend would turn up in time for both of you to catch the show. Worst case, you’d be a few minutes late.

Contrast with the situation today – how many communication flows would happen within those 15 minutes—“I’m running a bit late / stuck in traffic / where the #$%% are you…” and so on, across 5 different apps and devices.

For all our endeavors, there is a period of planning and a period of execution. While the need for course corrections during execution is self-evident, it is also highly desirable that we have a frozen planning period—i.e. a period where we will continue executing the original plan, despite new information coming in. All corrections should be made beyond this period, which will in most cases correspond with a safe-holding zone, where we recognize, process / interpret and decide corrective measures. We shouldn’t be in a purely reactive mode and throw the planning / holding periods out, just because our reaction abilities have advanced manifold. The same applies to the need for original structure in communication—we can leave it to back-and-forthing, but the long run costs will be significant.

It is of course entirely possible, that the human brain adapts to our new situation and its processing power increases manifold, thereby enabling us to get all the benefits without incurring the costs.

Just yesterday, I flew from Delhi to Pune, and my flight landed on time, at around 11 PM. The wheels had barely touched the tarmac, when everyone’s cellphone was out, flight mode off, and a hundred conversations started all at once. ‘Flight’s landed. No, we’re still taxi-ing. 20 minutes lagega. I’ll call you once I get the baggage. Then you start from the place you’ve parked (illegally) and pick me up. Etc. Etc.’

Outside the terminal, utter chaos reigns as everyone tries to time it to save those two minutes—the net effect is everyone probably spent 10 minutes more than they would have if nobody had called anybody. If our brains are really getting better, I’m seriously scared the only way I have to explain it is I’m getting more brain dead as I age.

I’m no Luddite, though I am a relatively late adopter of new technologies. There has been much that is good achieved in the last two decades, and there’s no going backwards. However, I see signs of deer fatigue around me all the time – increased stress, reduced attention spans, loss of patience, inability to hear out a complex argument and so on. Any suggestions on dealing with this are welcome.

(If you asked me for a specific suggestion, I’d say, switch off all those devices and pick up a good book. Paper book. One with pages that turn, which you can touch, smell, feel and place gently, in its place, in your bookshelf.)

The Social Network that broke the society! -Guest Post

Radhika Maira Tabrez

About the Author : Radhika lives in Unchahar (UP) with her husband, son and at last count 67 pairs of shoes. In another life, she was an MBA (HR) from SIBMwith over twelve years of experience in L&D, a movie buff and a Latin dance enthusiast. Now, living under the sovereignty of her kindergartner son and moonlighting as a writer, that life is all but a distant memory.She has won many writing contests and her work has featured in two of Readomania’s anthologies, a chapbook called Sankarak – A Literary Fusion and UnBound (an e-Magazine). She loves to read and write fiction and non-fiction alike. Ayn Rand, Virginia Woolf and Jhumpa Lahiri are her all time favorite writers and inspirations. Her debut novel will be out this summer.

She currently blogs at : https://radhikamairatabrez.wordpress.com/

The Social Network that broke the society! 

At the very outset, we should absolve Mark Zuckerberg of any blame here. I think his intentions were noble.He just wanted to do something nice - make a lot of money too in the process, but that is not the point here - by creating what he did. A platform, where we can travel through a metaphoric wormhole and be reunited with people across the fabric of space and time. Magic, pure magic! I could, for example, just search for the name of the girl I shared my desk with in fifth grade, and had lost touch with thereafter. And voila!... Be reunited just like that. A few hours spent on each other’s timelines would bring us up to speed on all that we had missed out; higher education, career, marriage, kids. It would be like we never even separated! It is a beautiful gift to have. A gift people from before our time did not have. A gift, unfortunately, the people in times to come wouldn’t ever realize the true value of, because they would have always had it. It is a privileged vantage point to be at, indeed.

Having said that, it would be unreasonable to expect that a phenomenon which has permeated our daily lives as deeply as social networking has, will not change our behavior significantly along the way. In good ways, and in bad.'

On the use-abuse continuum for any technology,we humans seldom know where to stop. That’s always been our problem. Hence, the lines demarcating a boon from a bane often, eventually, get blurred.What’s happening with social networking isn’t very different.

We had a few good years, no doubt. But once we had reconnected with whoever we wanted to, and made enough new friends along the way, and ‘liked’ a hundred odd pages on a variety of topics, and joined a dozen groups with common interests, and announced every ‘check-in’, and attained dizzying high levels in solving murder mysteries; I guess, the charm of it all just wore off. No amount of sharing photos of last night’s dinner, posting our ‘thinking out loud’ moments of wisdom, re-quoting overused platitudes and famous words from famous people; seemed to fill the void inside us (or the void on our Facebook walls!).

We needed more.

At least some people,thankfully, took to filling that void positively. Which is why it became a fantastic knowledge sharing tool. Thanks to Facebook, I now know how to re-purpose 80% of my trash like plastic bottles, broken ceramic and even spent up toilet paper rolls. I know enough survival tricks to give Bear Grylls a run for his money (only theoretically, though, because I obviously don’t have his exemplary courage). I know a zillion life hacks which has made me look at everyday items like rubber bands, duct tapes and binder clips with a renewed sense of respect. I have tried dozens of new recipes my friends recommended. Etc., etc., etc.

But unfortunately, not everyone wanted to contribute in that constructive manner.And that’s where I believe, things took a rather unwanted turn. Don’t believe me? Just try and recall your Facebook newsfeed over the last few months. Every single day there is some or the other heated debate going on (rarely purposeful, mostly pointless)

Is Deepika Padukone’s Vogue video feminist or a farce. Should Aamir Khan be exiled to Pakistan or not. Is the damn dress blue and black or white and gold! All that animated and articulate discussion makes for good entertainment, no doubt. I should know. I managed six months without satellite T.V., because I barely missed thoseT.V. dramas amidst all the remarkably better ones being played out in the social media. By real life people, no less!

But, once the laughs all this draws fade away and the eyebrows it raises settle down, you come to realize thedamage it carries in its wake.

Some of those discussions are very welcome, even necessary. Besides, there is nothing new in our need to poke our noses into every one’s business and give our unsolicited opinion/advice. We Indians, especially, are pretty immune to that kind of intrusive behavior and have dished out the same to others. But there is a hell lot of a difference in assertively stating one’s point and making a irrelevant wisecrack about every little thing you lay your eyes on. The former is something I respect and even look forward to. Good conversations and for that matter, good societies thrive on it. But somewhere in this virtual society, the nature of that behavior has gotten worse. It has become more abrasive. More intolerant. (Gosh! I am so wary of using that word these days, my fingers involuntarily moved to ‘Backspace’ after typing it)

I have a senior from college, who once posted a very bigoted and communally inciting message. He and I were on decent terms in college; one might even call them friendly. So I told him what he said was in bad taste. While I understand the basic sentiment it comes from; he should nevertheless delete it because it has the potential to hurt many people. In all earnest, I expected him to agree. Because I thought that is all it was, a silly comment, made during a bored working day afternoon.Perhaps while he was involuntarily enduring a mind-numbing meeting at the office? Perhaps he was pissed at someone for making him attend that boring meeting and found venting it all out somewhere else cathartic. I didn’t know. I also didn’t know that he was quite determined to follow through. He responded to my comment with a language and ‘so-called’ facts which were both uncalled for and needlessly harsh. I responded that an argument can be made both ways. But in making that argument we would both be required to say things which needn’t be uttered on a platform like this. That didn’t stop him. In fact, he dialed it up a notch.

It was then I realized, that it wasn’t just a random comment he made. It was all a part of his performance. One which he was putting up for the 500 + people on his friends list. This was his five minutes of fame. His chance to trend on his friends and acquaintances’ Newsfeed for a few hours. And that motive fueled his aggression. As a result, that one distasteful conversation became the decisive moment for an 5 year old acquaintance.

Our platforms I believe, have come to shape our interaction. Had we had this conversation in person, alone, or even with a few people around, I don’t think it would have ended this badly.There is a sense of comfort, of false courage, in the distance and anonymity this virtual world provides. To say all that in a face-to-face discussion takes a lot more than just keying in the first thing that comes to your mind. I noticed he had displayed similar bullying tendencies with a lot of people earlier as well. So I ‘unfollowed’ him to avoid seeing his pointlessly caustic comments. But then I started noticing similar behavior quite often,in a lot of other people. Perhaps I too did it to someone, sometime and got ‘unfollowed/unfreinded’ in the process. I wouldn’t know.

Makes me wonder, if this has anything to do with the quantum of the audience we all are playing for. For practically everything we post - even if it is as inane as what our cat ate for breakfast this morning - we have hundreds of eyes on it in a matter of minutes. It is the kind of grand stage, everyonedesires, but very few can handle with dignity and grace. Most of us get fazed by all the limelight and start acting goofy. Start posting clichéd quotes and platitudeswe don’t follow ourselves, endorsing ideas we can’t in all earnestness get behind, and opposing others’ point of views with a belligerence we don’t really feel.

And believe me, these aren’t even the worst things, this easy availablityof an audience makes us do.I remember, when Nepal got hit by the catastrophic earthquake, the entire world rushed forward to help.But pretty soon, that spirit of compassion and aid got overtaken by the urge to create propaganda. It then became a brazen contest of which religion is doing more to help the victims or even (outrageously!) the followers of which religion were the least affected by the tragedy. A gentleman I’m friends with had the maturity and guts to rap his own religionfor getting involved in such nonsense. But unfortunately, he is a rare specimen.

Then there are other subtle damages being caused to our social etiquette; none of them as grave as the ones mentioned above, but meriting concern, nevertheless.

One that particularly gets my goat, is seeing people wish someone ‘HBD’. I mean, if we are too busy to wish a “Happy Birthday J” to our friends, then maybe, we needn’t bother at all.But then, what’s to be said about the people who respond to all of their birthday wishes in a generic status message “Touched to have so many of your wishes and blessings.” Maybe the bugger deserves an “HBD” after all!

Our generation, sadly and painfully, still remembers the time when we couldn’t afford to buy an Archies greeting card ever so often and hence had to count on the Picasso inside us to draw up a Birthday/ Diwali/ New Years’ card. The beauty of the whole process was, the recipient of that mangle of colors didn’t quite care whether we were a Picasso reincarnate or not. He or she cherished it for the time and effort we put into it.

Ah! Time and effort.

Isn’t that the point of it all. We don’t want to spare neither of it,now, to nurture our relationships. It is not even nurturing really, strictly speaking. The operative word now is ‘maintenance’. More like ‘the minimum required maintenance’. So handmade cards led to e-cards and then to generic season’s greetings on Facebook and Twitter. Calls on special holidays and festivals turned to downloading the relevant images from the net and bulk forwarding them to friends and family on Whatsapp. 

The other day I saw someone’s status message, lamenting the fact that before Facebook he used to write and receive letters and postcards from his friends. After I was past the momentary nostalgia and pseudo-sadness that post was meant  generate, I wondered how was Facebook responsible for him not writing those letters anymore?

We may blame the world for becoming a colder and darker place, all we want. But, deep down inside, we must know, that it is only happening because we are letting it.

Because we want to make curt arguments and sound like know-alls at the cost of old friendships.Because we want to save 3 seconds of our time, by typing an “HBD” instead of “Happy Birthday”.Because we do not care to send letters and postcards to our friends anymore..Because when catastrophes strike, we are more concerned about who’s getting more propaganda rather than whether or not the victims are getting food and necessities.

So there it is, a social network which was meant to bring us all closer, now being a catalyst for further segregation and estrangement.

What is it that they say, you always get what you deserve, eh?

TL,DR; Just read the phrases in bold.

Guest Post - Singled out

C.Suresh

About the Author:

Fiction has been an addiction but the need to make a living took Suresh through Chemical Engineering and a PGDM at IIM-Bangalore and, from thence, to a long 16 year stint in the area of finance with specific expertise in fertilizer subsidies at IFFCO and a further two years as consulting expert in the same area. That, in his words, about sums up the boring part of his life, except for the people he was privileged to meet

Otherwise, he can be described as a mess of contradictions – a bookworm but avid trekker; alone but never lonely; enjoys solitude but loves company; lazy but a perfectionist, the litany is endless.

He has  also written a satire - A dog eat dogfood world - A hilarious pseudo-history of marketing management, which explicitly denies resemblance to any actual history, and which will be horrified if some semblance be found.

Note: Blogger requested him to write his experience on leading a bachelor life. Here his take on the same. 

Singled out

"Marriage – A process of finding out what sort of person your spouse would have preferred to marry”

It is not merely because I disliked learning that I stayed single. True, I am allergic to learning, especially about myself, since most of what I learn about myself is SO uncomplimentary. Still, it was not that at all.

To cut the long story short, it was my aversion to WORK that decided me on remaining single. Narayana Murthy’s son can choose to marry, even if he decided to be idle all his life. Me – I started off with zilch in inheritances and, thus, all that I spend had to be earned myself. Even in these gender-equal days, there is not much welcome for a husband who plans to live off your earnings. THAT part of gender inequality still remains, unfortunately. (Fortunately, actually. In my times, it certainly existed and I’d hardly be happy seeing a young kid of today happily living the life that I would have preferred to live.)

Deciding is all fine but to stick to it in the face of pressure from everyone who feels they have the right (which, effectively, means everyone who can match your face to your name – or, at least, find someone who can do it for them), that’s the difficulty. As I have indicated elsewhere in my personal rants, I had a neat little formula for it – especially since most of them would start with “What sort of a girl would you like to marry? We will find her for you” in a typical display of how optimism can overwhelm common-sense (and even eye-sight? Yeah – that, too). For that query I had a ready-made reply. “I want a beautiful, intelligent, talented, well-educated and rich girl. If she is all this and will marry me then she cannot be intelligent. Then how can I marry her?” With that one neat piece of logic I fended off all attempts to find me a spouse. There is certainly one girl in the world who has reason to be very grateful to me for saving her that fate worse than death – being married to me!

There are a lot of people who claim to envy me. The point, though, is that they never have walked in my shoes. Ever had a foot sprained and hopped all around the house to get a glass of water, make a cup of tea or even visit the loo? Had a right hand broken and find yourself having to do everything with the left hand all day – day after day? No? Well – I have had very helpful cousins, who made things easy for me, but still…they could not exactly stay around me all day, could they? AND I am too shrinking a violet to plonk myself in someone else’s house till they start supplying me with flight schedules and train timetables for reading material.

Forget the big issues. You start off life thinking how you can be single and continue to enjoy life the way you did in your youth. Then, one by one your friends get married. You call on them to go to a movie, they need to attend the PTA at their child’s school. You want to make whoopee one night, they are off to their in-laws’ place for a wedding. You plan a trip to the hill station and they are already there with their family. You, regretfully, decide to find friends among the younger lot and they call you ‘uncle’ and run off with their gang.

The point is that, if you think being single is going to keep you happy in the same way as it has always been, then you are in for a rude awakening. AND, if you are the sort to think in melodramatic terms like ‘always an outsider, shivering in the cold, looking in on warm and happy families without a hope of being a part of one’ and all that, you will start feeling lonely in additional to being alone.

It is not everyone who can be happy being single. Being married has its pros and cons, so does being single. Life is fun in any state as long as you can shrug away the cons and concentrate on the pros. Unfortunately, though, humanity seems geared to concentrate on the cons and disdain the pros. If that is how you are geared, it is best you get married. THERE you shall have company in your misery!

Me – I like being single, even if I have to hop, skip and jump every now and then. Even that adds variety to my life!

PS: The Author also  blogs at www.jambudweepam.blogspot.in which one of the top humour blog in India.

PPS: To know about other side of coin - that is about marriage : Read here