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Double helix

Have you beenOrkutised? Are you a Facebookie or a Youtubie? Do you see the world in MySpatial terms? If not, it’s time to be baptised; it’s time to get yourself a new identity. Get onto the hip online social networks, rechristen yourself, post an idea, or just say ‘hi’.Start by creating your own online community.

But before you do that, here’s some advice. There’s a vast audience out there which believes that the offline world should now adapt to the online networking universe — a series of postings that are actually synapses to a new social order.

This social architecture has friends and strangers, rebels and criminals, techies and whackies, youngies and oldies. The network may provide life-saving tips to members, help them to divorce loneliness in their darkest hours, or trigger a criminal impulse in their already-tortured minds.

Well, if diversity is logged on 24/7, crime could well brew in a network, defying Web 2.0’s social gospel. Still, if you think the devilish web is turning into a Sodom and Orkutah, and must be deleted at once, you are simply mistaken. You just can’t blame a cool tool for all that.

It’s not Orkut, Facebook, Youtube, or MySpace that’s redefining human relationships. It’s Web 2.0, a techno-geek term for a web world where content is shared, where the culture of opennness prevails, where your code is my code, where private moments are public affairs, and where a new society is slowly defining its DNA. Here, the content is user-created, user-recommended, user-shared, and user-recreated.

If you a Pereira from Bandra or a Deshpande from Girgaum, it’s wiser to change your names to Pereira 2.0 or Deshpande 2.0. That way, you’ll find what’s happening to your teenage kids faster. Your daughter’s net family may comprise 117 friends scattered across the world, from Manila to Cairo to Reykjavik. These are not her childhood friends; these are people with varying ages that she has befriended since Web 2.0 dawned. Her best friend is a 50-year-old drummer from Stockholm. Not surprisingly, she spends two or three hours a day chatting and playing with her friends; she spends only five minutes with her parents.

Don’t gauge her by her IQ; measure her by her NQ, the net-related intelligence quotient that upgrades self-learning. If you wish to be her friend, get an ID on Orkut, Facebook, or MySpace, and be her 118th friend. For, that’s the only way parenting can survive in the new millennium. You no longer have a nuclear family; you now live in a joint family related by hyperlinks

If you are a bossman, here’s what you could do. When your HR head is on a hiring spree, please tell him to do a Web 2.0 check. Does the candidate belong to any online community? How many hours does she spend on social networking? How many web applications does she use? Has she shared code with online friends? How many times a day does she upload and tag content? Can she conceive projects in spatial terms or see them through Web 2.0 goggles?

As you’ll realise, these are thrive-or-die questions. They could help you win the marketplace’s toughest battles. Next time you see a colleague spending an hour on social networking, jump with joy. Some genius somewhere may have just posted a mind-numbing idea on her online bulletin board to multiply marketshare. It could polevault you, and your organisation, to stardom.

To understand what the future will look like, read what Neil Howe and William Strauss have to say on the next 20 years, in the Harvard Business Review: “To anticipate what 40-year-olds will be like 20 years from now, don’t look at today’s 40-year-olds; look at today’s 20-year-olds.”

So, please keep watching today’s online communities. As Web 2.0 tries to bring different age-groups together, Web 3.0 will follow. It’s a social networking universe which bosses, parents, law-enforcers, oldies, luddites, cynics-generally people who are not sold on social networking-will soon populate.

Of course, if you believe that’s pure fantasy, you’ll only widen the generation gap at home-and office. It’s a wakeup call for all 40-year-olds. But it’s your call, really.

Email: vinaykamat@dnaindia.net