Varadarajan writes:

[S]hould we think of Facebook as yet another canvas on which the Indian etches himself into an entwined crowd? One can see this art of connection on display on many Indian Facebook pages, where seemingly private conversations are conducted in a wide-open space. “I sacked the maid,” an Indian “friend’s” recent status update said. “Anyone know how I can find another fast?” “Should I wax or thread?” another asked, provoking, like the first questioner, a torrent of responses that other cultures might regard as intrusive or presumptuous.

To be honest, I’m not really keen on the thesis here. I don’t mind the stereotypes (more on that later), but I do think it’s a bit of a stretch to use these stereotypes as an explanation for why any particular demographic enjoys connecting and communicating via the Web. Sure, Indian Facebook users love to tell people what they’re doing and to read about what everyone else is doing! Isn’t that the curry-eatin’, chai-drinkin’ point? It’s social networking; this is what Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut are for. (You remember, Orkut, right? If not, you might be living out the American stereotype of only caring about things that matter to America: Orkut is Google’s answer to Facebook, and while it thrives in places like India, the long-awaited service actually bombed in the States. But, I digress.)

There are about 1.2 billion people in India today. Of those, only 13 million use Orkut, while a scant 4 million use Facebook (Source: ComScore). Even if you count Indians worldwide and include those of us who live in the States, Varadarajan himself estimates that only 8 million of us are on Facebook. To give you some perspective, more than 275 million Indian citizens use mobile phones. Not all of our billion-plus people are Slumdogs hanging out at the Temple of Doom. (Talk about stereotypes!)

But back to why I don’t really mind Indian self-stereotyping: This might be an unpopular stance to take, but I believe that a lot of generalizations–particularly those that groups come up with for themselves–have at least some basis in truth. Why would we make this stuff up if we didn’t see these traits in our friends, our families, and even ourselves? I mean, most of the stereotypes that other groups have created for us have been pretty great: Everyone seems to think we’re all brilliant doctors and engineers who are genetically predisposed to academic success. We’re exotic, our food is fabulous, and above all else, we can dance.

So, I don’t disagree with Varadarajan’s assessment that social networking really jibes with Indians’ disdain for privacy and boundaries because when it comes to generalizations, you have to take the good with the bad. I do, however, disagree with his suggestion that this disdain is somehow unique to us. I seriously doubt Indians’ interest in social networking, which really is somewhat modest given the figures above, has anything more to do with cultural traits than with human ones.

Take a look at the frequently updated social-networking mockery sites, Failbooking and Lamebook. Maintainers of both sites seek out the most inappropriate, foolish, weirdest, creepiest content from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, and compile them for the rest of us to see so that we may join in them in pointing and laughing at the blurred out faces and scratched out names.

Here’s an example:

This mass ridicule is nothing new. Back in the days before social-networking sites, when more internet users socialized via chat rooms, sites like Bash.org sprang up to bring us comic gold like this:

Josh: QUESTION FOR EVERYONE....
SecureXeC: IT'S TO THE LEFT OF YOUR 'A' KEY.

All of these sites are based in The United States, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse nations in the world. All content is user-generated, and despite Failbooking’s halfhearted attempts at concealing names and faces, it’s quite apparent that this content comes from people from myriad walks of life.

The truth is, we’re all just a bunch of voyeurs with exhibitionist tendencies. If we weren’t, social networking would fail and Facebook, once run out of a dorm room, wouldn’t be worth the whopping $11 billion it is today.

I’m angry that nobody wants to hear my simple solution to the ‘they’re stealing our work’ problem. Here it is: Instead of posting stories online as HTML text, which can be read by search engines and copied-and-pasted by anyone, just convert the text to an watermarked image of the text. It would appear no different to the reader (except for the watermark, which could include a copyright notice), but nobody could copy the text (to paste elsewhere) because it would be a .jpg or .gif file and not text. If they copy/paste the text-image then the watermark and copyright notice have to go along for the ride. Search engines couldn’t read it without OCR processing, which they wouldn’t do (except for the largest major market papers) because that’s processor-intensive and they’re rather just steal from the next source than go to the trouble of transcribing yours. Problem solved (no charge).

In short, AJ8010 wants all copy text to appear as an image on his Web site, thus preventing search engines (and the people who use them) from finding them. In a later post, he writes:

If I want my stories cataloged by a search engine so they’ll send hits my way to read my stories and SEE MY ADS, then I’ll gladly send them a feed of tags in whatever format they need. They all have back doors for that purpose. But bloggers won’t be able to steal my text and reuse it without my ads because there won’t be any machine-readable text at the deep links I provide to the search engines.

Now on to why I think this journalist is barking up the wrong tree: Not only will bloggers be able to embed his JPEGed articles onto their blogs as he notes (still bypassing his ads for their readers), but he obviously has no real understanding of how search engines work.

Here are a few points I think he should consider:


Angry Journalist image courtesy of Gawker.

1. Bloggers will almost always cite where they get their news. Most people want to validate their arguments by saying things like “Hey, see? This was in the Times!” Also, though perhaps to a lesser extent, no one wants to take the blame for writing something that’s potentially inaccurate or controversial, so they give credit where credit is due. If anything, bloggers might end up driving more traffic to AJ8010′s site, particularly traffic that wouldn’t have gone there to begin with. Why pass up free advertising?
2. If bloggers are such a threat that their actions are noticeably taking away from his readership, AJ8010 should spend this time and energy trying to figure out why he and his news site aren’t getting more traffic. The key is to entice people to read your articles, not punish the few who were so enticed they decided to post your work on their own blogs. Logic dictates that people would prefer to read the news from the source, and not just from a blogging “middleman.” So if a blogger intrigues his or her readers with your work, those readers will eventually go to your site.
3. Search engine optimization: Let’s look at Google because it’s the big dog right now. Google’s algorithms still read meta tags, page titles, and URLs, but they put huge value on what’s visible on a page because that’s what readers want and because that’s what readers will see. If there is no or little text available with the article, Google will simply throw it out. Also, even if Google keeps the article, its ranking in a search will be lowered considerably because so many important key words from the article have now disappeared. (If you’re one of my students, you’ll remember my discussing all of this during our talk on search engine optimization. If you’re not one of my students, you can read a quick overview in the Week 2 lecture.)
4. What about visually impaired readers who require larger fonts, or the blind who use text-to-audio software to get their news?
5. By passive-aggressively only posting articles as JPEGs, AJ8010 will only end up sending whatever readers he has left away from his news site. People expect a certain freedom on the Web. If they don’t get it, they go elsewhere. Even if AJ8010 writes for a small-town paper, there are surely other regional papers or those from neighboring towns that wouldn’t mind absorbing his online readership. Print is suffering and newspapers are hungry.

All in all, I suspect AJ8010 is only going to hurt his readership. But what do you think? Does he have a case? On one hand, we’ve seen extensive digital rights management in the realm of music and movies–why not print? On the other, we’re now seeing a trend away from DRM, particularly with iTunes because DRM only really hinders those who buy music or DVDs legally–those who take these things illegally always find a way to get around DRM.

So, what do you think?