Well till an year back , most of the so called Indian Students (those famous for being studious) had nothing to do in their free time but watch TV or study , but a new bug has hit town, its called Orkut and boy is it spoiling us. I take my own example , overtly studious guy from New Delhi , did nothing but study and blog and read tech things , suddenly i get this urge to goto Orkut and scrap people , people whom i wouldnt talk to in real life and vice versa suddenly become my fans and vice versa and in the whole process a lot of time is wasted. So why do we Orkut ?
Its basic human psychology IMHO , we want company , when we cant get some in real life , we try to get it in the cyberworld , real people in the cyber world vying to be your friends and even soulmates. I goto my college library and i see every internet machine is logged onto Orkut , people wasting their precious time which would have been used to secure their future had it been 3 years back in time. I know of a few people who had earlier deleted their orkut accounts and then remade them , just because they couldnt get over their addiction. See the similarity in Orkut and Drug Addiction (leaving aint easy , you will face rejection)
Then there are people who like to look at it as a conspiracy , is it a conspiracy by the West to dumb us down ? , majority of the communities are full of Indian students , teenagers and people in their 20s at the peak of their productive lives. And what is the discussion in these communities , not good healthy conversation , but jibberish , “would you marry the person above you”, “add one if you are a boy or subtract 1 if you are a girl” , good for nothing nonsensical postings.
Not only stupid , its downright dangerous , with outright strangers making ‘offers of friendship’ to young women and some being gullible enough to accept them even without realising the obvious dangers involved in the act.
Then there are hate based communities , right from communities which proclaim your hate for a teacher to communities which proclaim your hate for another country , people are depicted as witches , national flags burning , is this the kind of thing we want to be involved in. Moreover the so called , report as bogus feature never seems to work, i take the particular example of a ‘we hate india community’ , i am sure about 5000 Indians atleast would have marked it abusive , but it was still there for months and months and months , i believe its still there or maybe it was taken down when someone filed a court case and when Google saw that its site maybe banned for Offensive and anti-nationalist content.
What people need to realise is that Google’s conscience wont stop all this , they are making cold hard cash out of this venture, they recently placed Google Adsense ads on Orkut , plus they made Orkut free for anyone to join too and their social resposibility doesnt seem to be overiding their buisness sense.
What i mean is that we really need to get rid of this addiction or else we are totally doomed !!!
