Given the importance that social media platforms (especially Facebook and WhatsApp) have acquired in our lives, the book under review has every reason to grab our attention, and rightly so. The subject acquires further importance because in recent years, social media platforms have become a vehicle for spreading hate and misinformation across India.
‘Move Fast & Break Things’ used to be Facebook’s motto till April 2014; and break plenty it certainly did. In 2019, so much appears to be broken or breaking—social harmony, democracy, various freedoms and more. There is sufficient evidence to believe that Facebook along with other Big Tech companies has played a significant role in getting us here.
Last year, a promotional video produced in Pakistan for the purpose of spreading awareness to the general public against rampant kidnapping of children from the street, which shows dramatization of a child getting picked up from a street by kidnappers on a motorcycle, was doctored in such a way that it looked like a CCTV footage of an actual kidnapping taking place.
Social media occupies enormous mind space but it is only one relatively shallow manifestation of human-computer interaction. Using Artificial Intelligence in the news industry as well as for multiple data collection applications in society is going to be the way forward.
The Model Thinker is a book about models. Models are not words, but formal mathematical representations that are put together to help us understand the world. This book looks at how people can apply a many-model thinking approach to understand these complex systems to find solutions. We live in an era of big data; from our phones, to online shopping, to our social media pages, data is everywhere.
The great ‘Talk revolution’ which gripped India and the world with the mobile phone in the nineties threatened to destroy reading and writing. It was assumed that if writing had defined how our heads were wired when it was invented, the mobile phone would unspool that. But technology is always tough to anticipate, so with text messages and then the smartphone, suddenly written text was right back into our lives.