Gauravonomics Blog

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As I wrote my analysis of the Valentine’s Day Pink Chaddi Campaign, I realized that it only appealed to the small minority of well-to-do, urban, English-speaking men and women in India who are amused by the irony of a woman being called ‘Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward’ in the same sentence. It also self-consciously distanced itself from the Indian mainstream which still wants its Bollywood heroines to be virginal and associates ‘Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women’ with the Bollywood vamps of yesteryears. The choice of sending pink panties to Shri Ram Sena further reinforced this self-consciously us versus them positioning.

I had earlier done a roundup of the discussions on the Pink Chaddi Campaign in the English language news media and the English blogosphere in India. To prove my hypothesis, I decided to test the limits of my Hindi and do a roundup of the discussions on the Pink Chaddi Campaign in the Hindi language news media and the Hindi blogosphere in India. I haven’t been able to search for Hindi news stories on the campaign, but the discussion on Hindi blogs did support my hypothesis.  Read More

Introduction: The Pink Chaddi Campaign as a case study of online citizen activism in India.

Last week, I wrote a longish roundup of the discussions in Indian mainstream and participatory media around the controversial Pink Chaddi Campaign.

Briefly, journalist Nisha Susan set up The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women on Facebook and urged women to gift pink panties to Pramod Mutalik, the head of the ultra-conservative Hindu group Shri Ram Sena, in order to shame him into backing down from his threats to disrupt Valentine’s Day celebrations.

The campaign has become one of the best Indian examples of how a grassroots community can come together, collaborate and take collective action using social media tools.

I have written before that managing collaboration in an online community is a cloud problem (irregular and unpredictable) rather than a clock problem.

We know the boundary conditions which are necessary for a vibrant community, but we also know that these conditions are not sufficient. So, most social media “initiatives” are trial and error affairs. Most websites fail to become vibrant communities. Most communities fail to collaborate towards a shared objective. Most collaboration fails to produce collective action. Most collective action fails to achieve the desired results.  Read More

I’m a big believer in the power of participatory media, and believe that citizen journalism and citizen activism will play an increasingly important role in business, development and government.

However, even for a die hard enthusiast like me, it’s almost impossible to ignore the reality that participatory news media has an interesting two way dynamics with legacy news media. Participatory news media (still) derives most of its legitimacy from legacy news media, even as it progressively hacks away at the power of legacy news media.

Consider this. Legacy news media — newspapers, television channels, and wire agencies — are still doing most of the first hand journalistic reporting. Bloggers, at best, have taken some stories that were “under-reported” in legacy news media and amplified them, sometimes through background research, so that legacy news media is forced to pay attention to them. This is especially true of online citizen activism.

Even in cases where bloggers have committed “acts of journalism”, and broken stories from a developing crisis scene, often in the form of photos or videos, such acts of journalism have relied on lagacy news media to reach the mainstream.  Read More

I was recently asked to comment on the similarities and differences between Indian and Chinese social media users. Here are some quick thoughts.

Out of the next billion Internet users (and the next billion mobile users), a substantial number will come from emerging economies like India and China, which are also the two most populous countries in the world. Therefore, to understand the future of new media, it’s important to understand how new media is being used in India and China.

China and India are similar in several ways. In both countries, Internet penetration is low and Internet access is often shared. In both countries, mobile penetration is much deeper than Internet penetration and mobile phones are the only personal communications device for most people. Neither country has led the world in Internet or mobile innovation, but both countries have been quick to adopt international innovations into local clones. Internet users in both India and China have large social circles both online and offline and are heavy users of social media, possibly because of a strong early adopter bias. Both countries have vibrant blogging communities which have played a leading role in covering natural disasters, like the 2004 South East Asia Tsunami, the 2008 China earthquake and the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack. Both the Chinese and the Indian Internet communities have flirted with online activism but struggled to use social media for social change in any meaningful way.  Read More