Of Facebook & Memes

For the past few months it seemed the entire world was gathered on Facebook except me. Curiously I didn't feel left behind. "I already have a social networking site in the form of Orkut. Who needs one more?", I told myself. But a few days ago I realized I was the last to know that Devesh’s family was shifting to Cuff Parade. This news was huge and I was blissfully unaware of it. No one seemed to be updating their Orkut accounts. So finally I joined Facebook to keep track of my world.

A day after joining, I met the same people who were present on my Orkut account, doing pretty much the same things they have always been doing, writing to others the same kinda timepass stuff they have always been writing; having the same kind of profiles they have always had… living the same lives they have been living all along. Everything was the same; it was just packaged differently like for example, here they wrote on walls, not scrapbooks.

I think it has some connotations in evolutionary biology. We like to move. We get bored of the same old place, the same old habits. New surroundings help add that newness factor to our lives. Shifting from one place to another on the web could very well be a new form of mass migration for us humans. And notice that it is not a huge change, no paradigm shift, just a new location for the ‘Friends’ button, or a change in font colour. As I said most things remain the same, it’s just the packaging that gets a redo.

Facebook was in vogue in the U.S. and other Westerns countries a couple of years ago, but had not caught on in India. This recent mass migration of a number of my friends, their friends, and their friends of friends could also be an example of how memes work. Someone must have made a shift from having Orkut as their homepage to Facebook, or they may have fallen in love with someone not found on Orkut but having a frequently visited Facebook account. This tiny little change may have snowballed into mass migration. It’s possible, but I don’t think any of these musings of mine are provable.

What do you think?