The Progressive School Vol 01 Issue 04

social networking
Social networks–
a boon or a bane?
Mike Rana
Creative Head & Founder, eFingertip Consultant Social Networking
When we talk about social network, a phenomenon that we all love and hate, we refer to a
methodology that connects people even when they are not in visual sight. The focus on SocialNets
should be to get the student and parent a part of the SocialNet. So, adopting a middle path would
make it a reality.
In the early days of 2nd generation
at IIT Bombay, we were constrained
due to the unavailability of giga and
terabytes of disk storage, screen monitors,
mouse and fingertip inputs that today
are in laps of school children. Thanks
to IBM, Microsoft, Apple and Samsung
for ushering in technology by leaps and
bound, slowly but surely. While we fiddled
with toggle switches to enter a binary
machine language program those days,
today’s generation has the luxury of highlevel
languages.
Mike Rana is the creative head of
efingertip digital magazine and has
published three books. He worked
with computers of the 2nd generation
and continues to work today when
networking and clouds have appeared
on the scene. This article is written by
him for the school children, parents
and the teachers.
58 THE PROGRESSIVE SCHOOL jul-AUG-SEP 2017
Did you know that a computer uses a
stored program to drive the logic inside
the machine? It’s the single most amazing
thing that happened to computers. Take
out the stored program and lo, you are
left with just some idiotic hardware.
Everything comes to life in digital devices
when stored programs, now we call them
applications, are made to reside inside
them. John von Neumann and Alfred
Boole may be turning in their graves
seeing what all could be done by stored
programs.
Why is a SocialNet different
from the others
When researchers at MIT
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
designed the first ever network of
computers, it only meant connecting the
computers together, on wires and later on
Wi-Fi. It was much later that we saw the
management folks using the fancy word
‘networking’ for a collection of people,
talking face to face in conferences.
And now when we talk about social
network, a phenomenon that we all love
and hate, we refer to a methodology that
connects people even when they are not in
visual sight. All they need is a hand-held
device and wi-fi or a broadband network,
available these days everywhere, even
on trains and flights. What this form of
communication achieves is connecting
individuals at both its ends; unhindered,
unsolicited and sometimes irritating. And
this connection is irrespective of caste,
creed, color or gender of the user. The
trend today is the use of voice, language,
and text language for communicating.
Little did we realize how quickly the
SocialNets became popular due to the
doings of HI-5, Facebook and WhatsApp,
and many others. And further, we might
be moving towards a community that
operates in a virtual workplace loaded on
the clouds. In other words, the SocialNets
are here to stay.
The social networking
trends
Obscenity, profanity, blasphemy,
sacrilege and many other words are used
by the older generation to describe the
behavior of children towards SocialNets.
This is unfortunately totally unfounded.
Haven’t we seen umpteen photos
on the internet depicting three or four
people sitting on the same bench, each
glued to his own phone, doing practically