Technology, Inequality, and Society

In this post I continue with a quick reading of the “ Teens, social media and technology 2022 ” survey findings. Previously I looked at Twitter, technology that teens never fell in love. In this post I am curious why so many teens broke their relationship with Facebook. In 2014-15 Facebook dominated Snapchat and Instagram. 71% of teens in the survey said they ‘ever use’ Facebook back then. The term ‘ever use’ can be misread so I clarify it a bit. They use this term to distinguish from ‘constant use’. It suffices to read ‘ever use’ as ‘once in a while’. In 2022 this number has plummeted to 32%. Only 2% of them associate themselves with ‘constant use’. Considering the scale, this is a dramatic drop. Why did this happen? It is easy to fall into the trap of weaving a story after the fact. There are many such contenders.  First a classic, “teens left when adults (and parents) flocked to it in huge numbers”.  Second, “teens never were into it actually despite what the big number sug...

The “ Teens, social media and technology 2022 ” survey conducted by Pew Research in the USA finds that teens (13-17 years) that ‘ever’ use Twitter has gone down from 33% in 2014-15 to 23% 2022. The term “ever use” means they “hardly use at all” in the context of the survey. Percentage of teens that “constantly use” Twitter would be much much lower, in single digit I would guess. We can extrapolate the guesstimate from their earlier report. In 2019 they reported that only 10% of the adult Twitter users are the “most active” (read it here ).  If we are to be observer similar proportion, total Teens that are most active on Twitter is 2.3%. There are several interesting observations regarding other social media platforms, which I will cover on other posts. I focus on Twitter to focus on specific questions that immediately came into my mind while reading the statistics. In no particular order: Is Twitter use driven by adults (non-teens) whose first experience with social media is throug...

  Academics is built on honesty and integrity, a journey towards the pursuit of truth. This was the romantic view of scholarship that I had as an undergraduate student of computer science back in 2000. I was weaving a narrative to convince myself that academicians were cast from an unblemished stone, unlike “experts” in tech-companies. Why was I imagining such a virtuous view of academia? There was an economic angle to it. Academic was and is a low-paying sector for similar level of expertise. It was natural to think why else anyone would choose academia (over tech-companies) unless there was unwavering dedication to scholarly work. Another virtue I imagined was that academia seemed to produce less exaggeration. The noise was less. But the major attraction was that academicians seemed to be able to deconstruct complex process effortlessly. How could anyone write equations to predict weather a minute, a day or a week from now. That seemed like magic. As I later understood, it was no...

The number of pages and size of the paper restricts the content of a book. This statement is unremarkable. In this note I argue that the size of the question paper and number of pages is crucial in what can be asked and explains what is being asked in Bachelor of Engineering examinations. A few weeks ago, I was preparing the question paper in the sample document circulated by the exam division. First thing I notice was that the size of the question paper is A5 (half of A4). In the first page, which contains preamble and the header, I could fit about 200 words. How many words I can write is further constrained by the whitespaces – the spacing between question number, the actual question and marks allotted to it, the spacing between two questions, and the margins width/height. In the following page, which does not have the preamble, I could write about 300 words. These numbers are ballpark figures and accurate measurements are not integral to my arguments. So, I leave it at these numbers...