Those of us who were (little) early to the Internet party would find the current forwarding and fake news culture on Whatsapp / Facebook similar to what ranting & flaming on newsgroups (e-groups) used to be in the early 2000s. However, newsgroups, because their access was to a limited few, were also places where ideas were born, partnerships formed & organisations were created. But I find Whatsapp (or other forms of messaging apps like Discord or Telegram) not being so. One probable reason for this, I feel, is the lack of long-form prose which email as a medium supported and which messaging as a medium shuns. Long form writing forces you to think deeper, engage in self-correction between various coordinated (or uncoordinated) parts of your own thinking and also help the reader absorb the context and message both. To be sure, the long form thinking was not mandatory in an email, and so, there was reactionism, flaming and shaming on newsgroups as well, but that was a...

The Economist argues in this article how online services which provide for personalised services are breaching some age-old notions of privacy. Google mines the data it collects from users for two purposes. One is to improve the user experience, making its various online services more personal, useful and rewarding for the individual—and thereby increasing their popularity. The other purpose is to provide better targeted information for advertisers. That is fine for the vast majority of internet users, who are happy to trade a measure of privacy for the convenience. However, most people (though not all) stop short of blurting out more intimate details about their private lives. Even so, all those innocuous bits of self-revelation can be pieced together, jig-saw fashion, by intelligent algorithms. Throw in the digital paper-trails stashed in Google searches and Amazon purchases, and things can begin to get a little scary. The above is a foregone conclusion - we all are ignorin...