Its confession time, folks.
Every December I’m immersed in immense guilt. It’s not from all the glutinous gluttony—though, admittedly, one sinned throughout the year—it’s the pile of unread books in one corner of my study. Or spread throughout the study, living room, bedroom, kitchen pantry and windowsills. Stacks of hardbacks and paperbacks make for mini towers—all imposing, shiny blocks that vie for attention.
I’m fortunate to be given a large number of books every year. First, I get them as presents. It’s perhaps easy or somewhat lazy to assume I only desire books; second, they are given as pitch material for the next edition of Dhaka Lit Fest, a standard practice by agents and publishers to promote their new names. Add these to my severe compulsion of frequenting bookshops—both first and second hand—and never managing to leave without a handful. My accumulation rate is so high that shelving the collection has become an issue, let alone reading them. I imagine most booklovers face storage issue at some point, unless they live in castles. One can be reasonably content with library borrowing, too, but I find that impossible. It’s a strange attachment I develop. I can never let go of a book after reading it. It’s even stranger because it’s unlikely that I’ll make the time to reread it, though exceptions apply.
Martin Amis rereads Lolita and Middlemarch once every decade, and finds new meanings. Amis is not on social media. Asked by a journalist, he compared it to a type of beast and one that doesn’t interest him enough to tame. I’ve been hearing or reading similar responses from writers, especially of his generation. No Barnes, Ishiguro, McEwan in that space—no, they never drank the Kool-Aid. Vikram Seth, while attending our festival in 2012, was asked by a member of the audience why he isn’t on Twitter. “It’s not my genre,” he responded to rounds of applause.
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Beast is a word that has been frequently used to describe Facebook. It’s the largest community of people online and it recently thanked its members by compromising their personal data. Yes, a staggering 87 millions of its users do not know who got their personal information, pictures, certain habits as certain users are more prone to share what they eat, sleep, shit. Now, that’s one dangerous, untrustworthy corporation. It’s not some free-spirited, friendly enterprise that got too big—it’s a manipulative giant that feeds on data. It follows our movements when we are online, e.g. every time we click the “like” or ignore the same button for any post, it is able to record the action. This way its highly sophisticated algorithms can work out much of our behavioral patterns. No other form of entertainment—music, television, cinema—is following you back, except Facebook. Something so Orwellian/1984 about that!
Anyway, I digress. In an attempt to start claiming back my reading time, I read a book by Jaron Lanier, one of the early visionaries from Silicon Valley, Ten Arguments to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (The Bodley Head), which was published in the summer. A couple of reviews online will give you the gist. Frankly, we already know much of the sordid details as described in Lanier’s book, and it was only going to be a matter of time before something like the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out. It was the biggest news of the year. Astonishing to think the scraggy old-Etonian Nix and his merry men got behind Brexit and as if that wasn’t enough, Trump voters too.
The truth, and here comes another confession, the news of Cambridge Analytica did not make me leave Facebook or Twitter. It made me restrict my use of them; I rebranded myself—as if anyone cared—as a “lite user”. On reflection, I was suffering from—in the millennial parlance—FOMO: fear of missing out. Of course, this is how social media works. It preys on our inner anxieties, and breed emptiness in us. I bet every one of us has thought of quitting the platform but it’s an addiction. Each notification of a “like” on your post is a little hit of dopamine to your brain; of course, it’s not only addictive, it’s fun too. But I find it ironic that the first president of Facebook, Sean Parker, apologized for creating this “fun” thing; the current CEO Mark Zuckerberg does not want Maxima, his daughter, to use Facebook, and let’s not forget he will be taken into police custody if he sets foot in Britain.
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Why blame the creators when the followers fuel the machine? Every industry, including publishing, is somehow relying on it because they made themselves reliant. I found it ridiculous when many literary agents and publishers demanded it to be mandatory for new writers to be active on social media to be awarded a contract. Thankfully, we are noticing a shift recently in the right direction. Most of the leading UK publishers are again beginning to be respectful of the writers need for headspace—so, they have done what they should have done from day 1: employ marketing professionals who would run the internet campaigns. The writer, rightly, should be left to do the writing. Posting tweets or status updates cannot be considered writing. Will we accept a “prolific writer” who has not written a single book but tweeted 45,000 times? I’m glad the publishing industry is finally being defiant.
Talking about acts of defiance, here is a story shared by Lionel Barber, the editor of Financial Times. Barber had met the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, couple of days before our dinner, when the latter was explaining a challenge the company is currently grappling with. It’s to do with “surge pricing”, which gets triggered automatically, if there’s a shortage of drivers in a specific area. The basic economics of the model is simple: the drivers earn more when the demand exceeds supply and surge pricing gets enabled on the app. Uber drivers outside San Francisco Airport have cottoned on to the fact that they can switch off their phones to create an artificial shortage. The airport, of course, has a steady stream of passengers but the drivers can collude to trigger the surge. It’s been happening and it’s amusing. It’s also reassuring to know individuals like us can tame—or even annihilate—any beast, if we are in unison. John Lennon would’ve probably added “social media” in the list of vices if he wrote Imagine today.
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Deleting Facebook and other social media apps should not make one feel virtuous, worthy or rebellious. If it does, it’s swapping one form of narcissism with another. And yet, it definitely feels like an act of rebellion. How does one create a social life without social media? Another thing, deleting social media shouldn’t make one preachy either! Whatever floats your boat, I say to you, and you may not be suffering from the guilt I’d been talking about. In that case, stick with social media and let me wish y’all a happy 2019!
Ahsan Akbar is Director of Dhaka Lit Fest. smokesfamous@gmail.com