The Hindu
M.G. Warrier
View: Erasers are made for those who make mistakes.
Counter-view:Erasers are made for those ‘willing to’ correct mistakes.
Quoted above is an excerpt from a mail I received from my good friend Badri. He has a special skill to select quotes that are not ‘controversial’. Here, the counter-view doesn’t reject the first view that erasers are made ‘for those who make mistakes’, but just sends out a message that the ‘use’ of the eraser is for those who correct things the moment they realise that something has gone wrong.
Badri says it is all about your ‘attitude’. It’s the same thing about social media, or any media for that matter!
All along, media, print, audio (you may have forgotten Aakashvaani, I can’t!) and visual have been playing a positive role in educating society, correcting policies and entertaining people. Side by side, there was the abuse on media for spreading rumours/scandals, destroying institutions, bringing down governments, and so on. We have heard about ‘paid news’, leaks, use/misuse of the right to information by the media for different purposes (both positive and negative), and so on. Then what is really ‘new’ about social media?
The present position of social media is, every individual who can use a mobile phone has a ‘political party’, ‘government’ and media (audio and visual) under her/his control, irrespective of age, maturity, literacy level or even ‘soundness’ of mind. Or that is the impression s/he creates in the minds of people who interact with her/him at some point. This is indeed an alarming situation.
Think of a five-year-old using his grandfather’s mobile and transferring funds from the old man’s bank account to an unknown person’s account by just following the instructions coming up on the mobile screen.
Or me, getting a call from an insane person asking me to transfer a particular amount to a specified account to save ‘X’ who I know but have not been in touch with for some time.
It’s not just monetary. Abuse of the electronic media at various levels by miscreants for several anti-social purposes is on the increase. And believe me, we are not going to get laws or regulations in place that will provide any blanket insulation from the harms this monster can do in our day-to-day life.
Still, there is hope, and before discussing options to minimise the possibility of our becoming ‘victims’ of frauds, let us examine the modus operandi of fraudsters in a couple of other instances.
Till the end of the last century, duping people was a fairly time-consuming activity. Remember the chit funds, multi level marketing (MLM) schemes, IPOs, discount offers, instalment schemes and other money-multiplying activities in which some of us or our friends would have lost at least some money. By and large, the cheats were identified quickly by word of mouth, and losses were restricted to groups of people or some geographical areas.
A few years back, crores of rupees went down the drain in a scam, termed ‘mobile phone for ?251 offer’. Several people across the world are losing money every day by responding to phone calls or emails offering huge amounts against payment of ‘handling charges’ or ‘initial expenses’. Most of the offers come through messages from ‘unknown’ entities.
In the post-demonetisation days, quickly following some reports about fraudulent transactions using debit/credit cards, bank account- holders started receiving offers over the phone to ‘insure’ card transactions against payment of a ‘small’ fee. The promise from the other end of the phone was, once ‘insured’ any loss incurred by using debit/credit cards will be made good. But it turned out that there was no such scheme.
Through social media, many things are offered for free. The use of WhatsApp for several purposes, I am told, is free (Disclaimer: I don’t have a WhatsApp account yet).
When I am using a mobile/internet connection provided by ‘Service Provider X’, someone on behalf of a ‘service provider’ calls me and asks me about the last monthly bill I paid for the mobile/internet services.
First, thinking that the call is from ‘X’, I answer some questions. Then I am told that the call is from ‘Y’, who will arrange to shift my account to his company, ‘free of cost and without change of number’, after which I will be paying much less for the same services I use. That’s ‘aggressive marketing’ in the digital world, my daughter tells me.
We can’t now run away from technology or the gadgets and services that make our lives ‘more fulfilling’. My request to those who spend more than two hours a day accessing ‘social media’ (traditional print and electronic media are excluded) is: “Please check and ensure you are using commonsense the same way you were using it during the last decade.”
