Transforming 7 Billion Dreams into Reality

As you read this, our planet is exploding with a steady rise in population. Indeed, the world population may reach 9 billion in 2030, from about 7 billion now. This means we will soon have over a billion additional people living on our planet.

Add to this, the economic growth of nations, along with climate change, will create immense stress on our planet. By 2030, we will see increase in food demand by over 50 percent, energy demand by 40 percent and water demand to exceed global availability by 40 percent.

Significantly, the urban spaces will struggle most to keep pace with this growth as half of the world population lives in urban areas squeezing the resources, and the number of urban dwellers grows each day. No doubt, some estimates indicate that, ~3.5 planets Earth would be needed to sustain a global population achieving the current lifestyle of the average European or North American.

This brings us to ponder about the existential question: Is our world ready for 9 billion people? How can we create a better tomorrow for our people, and the planet? How do we optimize our resources to build a sustainable future?

An interesting corollary is the United Nations theme for World Environment Day (celebrated on June 5) this year  - Seven billion dreams. One Planet. Consume with care…While the intent of the campaign is noble and the aim is to raise awareness about environmental issues and call for action, it must become our collective endeavor not to relegate such commemorations to mere rituals, and inane tokenism.

So, how do we transform over 7 billion dreams into reality? Realizing a brighter future for the humanity, calls for forward thinking and innovation - rooted deeply in open collaboration, amongst individuals, enterprises, public private partnership, academia, data scientists, cities and nations.

It’s all about creating more sustainable lifestyles, individually and collectively, and adding value to all our activities. This is vital since we will not have three planets to sustain our way of life, but for the One.

To actualize this existential dream we need to push for sustained innovation, and build smarter building, smarter homes, smarter cities and smarter nations. We need to think green and act like real innovators who see what everyone else sees, but think of what no one else thinks. We need to refuse the status quo, design inspirations into greener solutions and transform ideas into game changing products and services.

As a first step, we need to embrace system thinking, and tap the most abundant natural resource on earth, data - flowing all around us, between devices, individuals, homes, buildings, enterprises cities and nations – across globe. This is crucial, as every minute, every instant that we’re online, we’re trying to make sense of a blizzard of data. By using sophisticated analytics, not just instinct, we can make our world more integrated, and more sustainable.

For instance, precision agriculture can help us meet our food needs. Drought resistant and disease resistant strains of cereals and fruits can improve the bounty of the crop yield. Intelligent supply chains and warehouses can keep food fresh from farm to fork, and keep our inventories healthy. Smarter transport systems can ease commuter pain and kill pollution. Smart grids can our help prevent black outs and help optimize our water resources. Green building can reduce energy consumptions.

We can make this happen and much more if we can tap into actionable insights emanating from our disparate systems. More so, since in this information age, we’re all information analysts. And, living smart within planetary boundaries is the most promising strategy for building a healthy future. Of course, it starts with an individual action that leads to collective power…and translates to exponential impact.

Let’s take a moment to think how we live, work, play, shop, travel and eat - how it impacts our planet and how we can optimize our resources. It’s high time for us to walk the talk. As T J Watson once expressed, “all the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.” Are we ready to take the plunge? The time to act is now.

The Blogger is Kiran Kumar Yellupula:  The views expressed here are purely personal. Please share your feedback at mediavalue@yahoo.com

The Alchemy of Disruptive Innovation

What’s keeping the CEOs awake at night, these days? You guessed it right. Leaders across the geographies and industries are overwhelmed by the profound changes in technology, cost structures, next-gen services, business models, markets and customer behavior. They are under intense pressure, struggling to keep pace with change, defend their vulnerable business models and market share while pursuing new growth opportunities.

Perplexing it is, as, each moment, someone somewhere is quietly working on intuitive and real time innovations that can virtually create new markets by discovering new categories of customers. Harnessing new technologies, developing new business models and exploiting old technologies in new ways, they are toppling the market leaders.

This is significant, as the topple rate, a degree of how rapidly companies lose their leadership position, has increased by almost 40 percent in last few decades. Besides, the average job tenure for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company has halved from ten years in 2000 to less than five years today. Likewise, the tenure of companies on the S&P 500 was 61 years in 1958; it’s now 18 years.

Disruptive start-ups are driving corporate reinvention. No industry is immune to this. Some of the notable category disruptors include: classified ads (Craigslist), long distance calls (Skype), record stores (iTunes), research libraries (Google), local stores (eBay), taxis (Uber) and newspapers (Twitter).

Faced with the innovator’s paradox, the industry leading incumbents are finding it tough to choose between holding onto an existing market or to capturing new markets. Many of the world's largest corporations are scrambling to transform and reinvent their businesses as lean disruptors are tapping into shared business models, efficient cloud, analytics, predictive insights and socially influenced consumers to create new value and client experiences.

The good news is progressive leaders are reinventing the way they engage more intimately with customers and make their products and services more accessible and available through all channels of interaction. Continually challenged to disrupt, innovate and respond to an ever-changing set of business dynamics and economic conditions, forward thinking C-suite leaders are scouting for strategic partners to manage disruption, innovate and meet change head on.

For instance, when it comes to the future of work they are focused on adapting to the changes which are impacting the way we work and live.  Emergence of new social technologies, a shift to the cloud, rise of millennials as the majority workforce and increased mobility of work is driving the same.

The result is increased employee engagement, a more collaborative innovation culture for staff to explore and accelerate the client value rooted in rapid design thinking and fluid work spaces for a cross pollinating ideas from a diverse workforce driven by a solution centric, user centric approach. Many smart organizations are already pushing the boundaries in design thinking, flattening hierarchies, rapid prototyping, productivity efficiency, and user satisfaction to accelerate their innovation journey.

In the disruptive age we are in, the gospel of thinking is no longer business as usual. To succeed and thrive, we need to collectively think out of the box as differentiation rules. And differentiation comes from the way people think. And, only the right talent will ensure that you are always on the right side of the change.

The power to transform one’s business and stay ahead of the game lies inherent.

IT’s all about people, you see. And, more importantly, it’s the ability to think different. Such creativity is not a genetic predisposition, but is an active endeavour with strong cognitive trait of association, passionate questioning, intense observing, diverse networking, and continual experimenting.

To sail smart in today’s turbulent times, leaders must vie for revolution in thinking: experimenting with a steady stream of disruptive strategies and game-changing solutions to stay ahead of the game, making bold moves, consistently differentiating, even at the very peak of their success, even when, they are not pushed into a corner. Shunning complacency, they need to stay hungry for change, and challenge the status quo, wherever they are, and whatever they do, to add value to clients, business and society.

At some time, someone somewhere is going to disrupt your entire industry. There is no reason why it shouldn’t be you? Who knows the next Steve Jobs could be your grass-root employee, silently working with your customer.

Are we ready to tap the exponential value?

The Blogger is Kiran Kumar Yellupula:  The views expressed here are purely personal. Please share your feedback at mediavalue@yahoo.com

Harnessing Big Data to Build A Sustainable World

Revolutionary. This one word aptly captures the era we are in. Indeed, we are at the cusp of a silent revolution. As big data takes the center stage, impacting the way we live, work and play - humanity is grappling with the biggest existential crisis ever, marooned by huge volume, variety and velocity of the information in a hyper connected world.

Add to that, each moment we are getting rocked by disruptive innovations. Businesses across sectors are struggling to embrace this paradigm shift. Boundaries between the industries are blurring as technology turns ubiquitous, demolishing silos.

Integration is the name of the game in the new normal as the massive networks of devices, sensors and the connected devices are reshaping our planet. This is significant as research reports estimate that by 2017, the Internet of Things market will reach $7.3 trillion. 

Some analysts predict by 2020, the world will have about 25 to 75 billion connected devices. While this presents a tremendous opportunity for economic growth and innovation, much depends on how enterprises sail smart through the lanes of disruptive innovation.

Interestingly, cities are emerging as the epicentre of this innovation era. The momentum of these smart cities is propelled by the art and science of the data driven corporate real estate.

At the heart of this lies sustainable buildings, alive and kicking infusing life into the skylines, breathing data, offering next generation services, reducing carbon footprint, improving the quality of life, and making the world better.

To succeed and thrive in the above context, it’s imperative for the C-Suite leaders to harness the right business intelligence from all types of data from people, processes and technologies, flowing through an organization. They must tap the big data, and discover actionable insights that help them make smarter decisions,

There is little alternative to putting the structured and unstructured data into context and analyzing the real time insights through right integration and right governance. However, cost-effectively managing the data, gleaning timely insights – and reaping the desired business outcomes is not easy. And, this is where a trusted adviser can help transform the business -   “data scientists” who know how to manage whispering cities.

The good news is forward thinking leaders across the globe are collaborating with these experts who use sophisticated predictive analytics to deliver enterprise wide visibility and deeper insights into every decision, every business process and every system of engagement to drive better business outcomes.

Make no mistakes. Indeed, how smarter and faster we embrace the data driven decision making that really matters for our lives, clients, business and society will shape the future of humanity.

The question is - are we ‘ready’ to transform our cities into a hub of innovation? Are we ready to deliver next-generation,  greener, citizen-centric, professional services for building a sustainable world? 

The answer lies in collaboration, integration and continual innovation. Yes, together, we can...

The Blogger is Kiran Kumar Yellupula:  The views expressed here are purely personal. Please share your feedback at mediavalue@yahoo.com

Building A Timeless Brand

Engulfed by the tsunami of digital transformation all around us, global markets have turned more uncertain as the way people retrieve, consume, share information has changed. The C suite executives across the globe are keen to sail smart into the future, to succeed and thrive.

IT’s all about defying eternity and creating a timeless brand as disruptive technologies shake the complacency out of archaic systems and processes. So, how is this going to impact the future and what can we do to create a timeless brand? Significantly, this has become a question of survival for enterprises, big or small.

Read on to navigate some of the trends that will shape the industry in the years ahead.

Artificial Intelligence is going to dominate the future as forward thinking leaders will seek higher performance and measurable outcomes. In a bid to outsmart the competition, they will focus on doing more with less for more. This will entail embracing more automation, more predictive analytics, and a higher shift to machine learning and robotics, all aimed at better decision making, optimizing cost, balancing resources and improving productivity. We will see more and more intelligent agents able to perform jobs that require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, and decision-making. From IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri, Google Voice Search, Google Brain, Google Translate, Xbox, Netflix, and autonomous cars artificial intelligence has already slowly impacting our lives.

Precision marketing will rule as brands will see their identity continue to have a roller coaster ride with self-learning ‘data driven insights’ transforming their narratives. The radicle shifts in the way buyers look for and consume information and the manner in which they want to be interacted will trigger more granular and integrated customer-centric strategies. As empowered consumers will increasingly expect brands to anticipate and respond to their customized needs quickly, CMOs will strive to aggregate, enrich, and glean real time predictive insights from big data – through offline, online and social sentiment analysis. As the pace of technology development is going to be rapid; marketers need to be in a constant state of test- learn-run experimentation mode, in order to intelligently decide what makes sense for their businesses.

Customer Experience will remain vital to thrive in the intelligent era. This will be accentuated by fundamentally and unpredictable breakthrough in technologies like hybrid Clouds which will force the leaders to seek a deep, scientific understanding of the cognition of the customers.  Armed with novel, real-time, insights - forward thinking leaders will harness advanced customer experience solutions to embrace digitally transformation and differentiate their products and services across all channels, touch points, and interactions.

CMOs will be able to create a single source of customer data and develop ‘persona’ for every marketing process and predict behaviors. In a bid to personalize meaningful experiences, influence, and monetize, the leaders will treat every customer as an individual. This kind of ‘precision marketing’ will entail listening, analyzing, profiling, and engaging customers intelligently across the full client life cycle with the right content in the right context to amplify the brand narrative and deepen the relationship.

The good news is computational advertising is already helping the marketers find the best match between a given user in a given context and a suitable advertisement or content customized for the target. Leaders will also tap emotion detection and analysis tools to generate actionable insights to create new levels of customer intimacy. Recommendation engines can offer thought leadership articles, blogs or videos to on-line audience, based on a prediction of their interests. They can help predict customer preferences, interests and prod them to purchase or influence. Social sentiment analysis tools will see greater adoption.

Leaders will embrace Natural Language Processing and Brain-machine interfaces to measure and track customer focus, engagement, interest, excitement, affinity, relaxation, and stress levels. While still a work in progress, machine perception is a near reality today. Advanced adaptive technologies will help marketers better understand their customers using computer vision, machine hearing, and machine touch. Collaborative research like BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) will help map Brain neurons connections and help gain insight into how the brain’s individual cells and complex neural circuits interact. This will also help future marketers to foster customer loyalty scientifically, and effectively.

The question is how do the smarter leaders embrace such rapid change? As marketing evolves into a fusion of art and science, an open, collaborative, multi-disciplinary, experimental and creative attitude will be needed to sense, influence and serve. IT’s all about being essential to clients, to continually learn, innovate and add sustained value to business and society, and to stay ahead of the curve – Whatever is the Next.

Are we ready to embrace the future?

The Blogger is Kiran Kumar Yellupula:  The views expressed here are purely personal. Please share your feedback at mediavalue@yahoo.com

The next wave of machine learning

Athena, the first robot to buy a ticket, flew on a commercial airplane. She recently boarded her flight at Los Angeles International Airport with everyone else in economy. Interesting. Isn't it?

Now, consider this. A team of engineers have designed the world's first bionic man, a walking, talking robot made up of 28 mechanical body parts from 17 international manufacturers. Frank(short for Frankenstein) the bionic man even features a circulatory system and beating heart. Agree, there is a way to go, yet, as man and technology take the digital leap together, they are evolving together in radically new ways.

The future has arrived. As exponential growth of disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing continues, the dawn of the "conscious machines” seems not too far. Machines that could be loaded with human consciousness, machines that are smarter than us, albeit, with different values, ethics, and virtues…Homo sapiens 2.0?

Going by the digital transformation all around us and the tech breakthroughs robots will rise, and, machines will assume critical control of many human tasks, perhaps sooner than we realize.

A study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford's Program on the Impacts of Future Technology put the matter starkly. In their analysis of over 700 different jobs, almost half could be done by a computer in the future. This wave of computerization could destroy not simply low-wage, low-skill jobs, but also impact the way we work, and live. A human revolution is in the offing. This is possible as power of digital insights is “converging”, and infiltrating all disciplines artificial intelligence, computing and networks, robotics, 3D printing, genomics, and healthcare.

So, are we poised to wrest biology from nature? To develop machines with intelligence that rivals or outstrips our own? Can we manipulate the material world on molecular scales? What happens to humanity, then, when super intelligent robots take over? Will it be the end of the mankind as we know IT? Are we prepared for smartly navigating the post human era?

According to Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest living scientific mind, while the primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved useful, the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Humans may not effectively compete with an AI which would take off on its own, re-design itself at an ever increasing rate and reach an intelligence that would surpass that of humans. Limited by slow biological evolution, human race may be superseded.

Tesla/SpaceX founder, futurist and famous industrialist, Elon Musk too recently warned that our sci-fi nightmares about artificial intelligence could actually come true in our lifetimes. He called artificial intelligence humanity's biggest "existential risk" and likening it to "summoning the demon."

Stuart Armstrong from Oxford University’s at the Future of Humanity Institute takes that risk too seriously, as he feels that AI could kill us all, if we don’t take steps to program it right. This resembles an event that's been dubbed the intelligence explosion -- a term used by scientist Irving John Good in a paper outlining the development path for artificial intelligence. For Irving John Good the development of an ultra-intelligent machine could be the "last invention that man need ever make" as after that, humanity would cede innovation and technological development to its smarter progeny.

Not all are skeptical about the future and the positive possibilities and amplification of human capabilities, in every sphere.

Ray Kurzweil, leading futurist and MIT professor, stresses that the exponential growth of artificial intelligence will lead to a technological singularity, a point when machine intelligence will overpower human intelligence. Interestingly, Kurzweil who is also Google’s Director of Engineering, striked back recently against the likes of Musk and Hawking—and in Hawking’s case, even took a bit of a swipe, noting that AI is “helping the disabled (including providing Hawking’s voice).”

Let’s dive deeper... For Demis Hassabis, co-founder of the Google-owned artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, is focused on creating "AI scientists".  It’s all about mimicking human brain, in the form of algorithms and data to retrieve them for tasks it was not previously been programmed to do.

Significantly, The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative aimed at revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain too could have far reaching impact beyond new ways to treat, cure and prevent brain disorder. It’s all also about decoding the human brain, and the infinite possibilities and powers that it would bestow.

For instance, Nick Bostrom thinks that super-intelligence could help us solve issues such as disease, poverty, and environmental destruction, and could help us to “enhance” ourselves. In The Second Machine Age, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee highlight how we build, use, and live with our digital creations will define our success as a civilization in the 21st century.

While the opportunities of AI are unlimited, from helping to cure disease and treating disabilities, to advance renewable energy and bring education to people around the globe - the uncertainty around AI is why we shouldn’t ignore warnings from folks like Hawking et al.

The world needs to watch IT more carefully as the race to conquer human mind intensifies, and so are the tools to win the human consciousness. Individuals, businesses, society and nations must learn to compete smartly with machines.

We need to move beyond the rhetoric of "manufacturing consent" and think conscientiously to explore how the next wave of machine learning will impact the human race? How is this is going to complement human jobs? How the next generation of “digital natives” will leverage their skills in a new labor market? How we will design the future cities when cars are autonomous and so are many of our gadgets? Who will own the rights to our DNA? How our policies can keep pace with accelerating change?




The age of Homo sapiens 2.0 is arriving fast. Digital Gurus like Nicholas Negroponte find no reason to disbelieve that nanobots in our brain might shape the future of learning, and much more as humanity is moving to a post-biological future.

When the super intelligent machines rise, we’ll surely need to be ready for them. Are we ready for the human revolution?

The Blogger is Kiran Kumar Yellupula:  The views expressed here are purely personal. Please share your feedback at mediavalue@yahoo.com

Lemon, Chilies & Culture Marketing

As cultural tuning increases the likelihood of effective persuasion, the challenge is how marketers can create effective persuasion and messaging to positively influence the buying behavior

Kumar picks up a ‘thread of fresh lemon and chilies’ from a street vendor near his computer hardware store which he owns. He then hangs the ‘threaded charm’ above the entrance to the store as a talisman. If you happen to walk in the streets of India, on a Saturday, you can’t miss this familiar sight - shops, houses, auto rickshaws and trucks hanging threads of lemon & chilies. No, they are not meant for salad, but are there to ward off the evil eyes.

On the contrary, red Swastika (as depicted above), a symbol of auspiciousness in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism connoting good luck,

One may call it superstitions, blind-belief system or heights of ignorance. Yet, this indicates how strangely culture is rooted deep into the human psyche. To make matters complex there is a high degree of arbitrariness that lends meaning to such abstract symbolism. While there are interesting differences among cultures regarding conceptual associations that constitute meaning, this has emerged as a potent tool to influence the minds for marketers.

In every society, these hidden culture codes or structures make their mark. Hidden, as often, we are not aware of these ‘culture markers’ or pay little attention to them, yet, they shape our behaviour, and our decisions. Such codes deal with strongly held beliefs, and manifest highly, even though those who use them tend to be unaware of them.

While codes vary in scope from the universal to the local, deciphering the same can lead to novel insights to drive audience activated content marketing programs rich in persuasive precision. This is important as by default we humans are meaning-generating and meaning-interpreting animals, besides whatever else we are. What this means is coding text and decoding the phenomena around us, we endlessly, produce and consume interpretations.

Let’s consider, Barbie doll. The name carries a lot of meaning because a Barbie doll has long been an icon in society. What comes to your mind or to your little girl, literally, when you think of Barbie Doll? What does it denotes to you? How would you describe it literally? A trendy toy doll, first marketed in 1959, that was 11.5 inches high, had measurements of 5.25 inches at the bust, 3.0 inches at the waist, and 4.25 inches at the hips.

Although it is a children’s toy, what a Barbie doll could connote or codify to a girl is a woman with a perfect body and exonerating beauty. This is also about a dreamland of princesses, fairies, fashion, shopping, friends, relationships and party-times. For some critics, the great popularity of the doll marks the end of motherhood as a dominant role for little girls, as Barbie spends her time as a "courtesan," buying clothes and having relationships with Ken and other dolls. She does not prepare little girls to be mothers, as earlier dolls did, dolls the girls could treat as babies, imitating their mothers' roles. One can construe that the doll and its variants are symbolic codified content which is designed to engage and influence the young minds, appealing to the inner realm of the psyche.

Forward thinking marketers are adept at successfully tapping cultural awareness, cultural intelligence and cultural sensitivity. As cultural tuning increases the likelihood of effective persuasion, the challenge is how marketers can create effective persuasion and messaging to positively influence the buying behaviour of the customer as an individual.

For content producers and marketers, often the greatest challenge is synergizing their own codes and the codes of the audiences, who often decode them differently from the way the creators intended. The result: aberrant decoding, leading to diluted impact, and messages getting lost in the clutter and noise.

Creating culture markers that are embedded deep in the content can strike immediate chord with the audience. Using these codes and driving greater mindshare based on an evolving mass of covert meanings and associations can increase audience affinity and loyalty. Leveraging the unconscious universe of language and assumptions shared by producers and consumers of messages can help create a targeted brand mix.

The hidden part of the iceberg is a brand’s cultural unconscious made up of associations, similarities and significant differences that opens the doors to the unconscious mind in the individual. Winning the influence warfare calls for a peaceful plunge into the psyche.

The Blogger is Kiran Kumar Yellupula:  The views expressed here are purely personal. Please share your feedback at mediavalue@yahoo.com

You, Me and Miss Social

We, Homo sapiens, have evolved a lot, from scribbling wall paintings in ‘caves’ to online ‘social media’ posts. One thing hasn’t changed much, though - the craving for being needed, loved and belonged. So, is there anything anti-social about social media?

 

Hold on. This is not the love story of Adam, Eve and the forbidden fruit. This is about you, me and Miss Social (media), in the context of present times, where technology has invaded our personal lives like never before. Step on to the era of Services like Instagram, Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook which encourage users to share from the rooftop every life event as material to be viewed and commented on.

 

Strange, isn’t it? Love and relationships have turned buttons of “likes” - and so are self-expressions. Indeed, in a fast paced world, isolated from real one-on-one relationship, the enigma is stark clear. While the average adult Facebook user has more than 300 friends, in reality, research indicates, average adult has far fewer friends - perhaps just a couple of good ones, in many cases.

Scratch the surface, and dig deeper into the consciousness. What do you see? We have mutated into a species that will invariably have its fingers on a digital device or keyboard at all times. Look at the irony, cut off from the real world and avoiding actual human contact, we still claim to be high on the social, glued on to the touch screens.

Our happiness has become a measure of the number of “likes” we get on that new FB photo. We feel elated when we get too many RT’s on that tweet of ours? Often, we “like” or “RT” a friend’s post or tweet with a latent desire of being reciprocated in return.  We have started rating our popularity and clout in terms of the “followers” we have.

The reason: Our actions on Social Media sites are acting as a potent tool to gratify our inherent desire to be ‘needed’ in the ever increasing tsunami of information, nuclear families, stressed lives and aching hearts. In an increasingly connected world, may be your lonely hearts and minds are gasping for an iota of “attention and recognition.” So much so that there is an unspoken war out there to own that fraction of that attention span.

Behind the pink social status of carefully selected, ever happy ‘photos, and ‘texts’ lies the rising emptiness and isolations of real-life social belongingness. So, strong is the charm of social forums that unknowingly you get addicted to “likes” on social media as an affirmation of your identity. Indeed, fame is now reduced to its most basic ingredient: public attention.

Look at the paradox, friendship and love becomes a score keeping of the “likes”, “followers” or “RTs”. The real humor is “all is well” on social media. Often, everyone is happy. And, there are a thousand ways to flaunt happiness and self-worth, at the click of a button or filter.

Yet, there is little “social” about the social media. For instance, we don’t have to have a face-to-face discussion to end a relationship; it can all be done with a click of a button, just Unfriend. Perhaps this one-button-does-everything mentality that we’re now so used to is making us less social (or social, pun intended) and more insensitive to the feelings of others. The question is does it allude to the existential crisis that has infected us in today’s fast paced life?

Well! Who among us has never experienced the desire to be liked, a bit more, just a little bit more than others? Indeed, deep within us lies an inherent trait which craves for a constant reassurance of being loved, recognized and needed. And, this desire sprouts right from the cradle to the grave. There's a very human need for intimate, one-to-one communications.

The concern though is social media helps fuel feelings of isolation, anxiety and self-doubt to an extent. Some research indicates that the longer people spent on Facebook each week, the more they agreed that everyone else was happier, prettier and had better lives.

Being on the short end of someone’s social media endorsements can create feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, and irritation, while being too generous with your own social media praise can feel one-sided when left unreciprocated. Often, it can facilitate jealousy and suspicion in romantic relationships and open up new modes for stalking and harassment.

Ironically, a fear of missing out (FOMO) on something better can make you miss out on all the things you do have going on in your life right now. This anxiety tends to cause compulsive behaviors, like checking out other social situations even as you are in the middle of one currently. Unfortunately, FOMO can lead to many acquaintances but no close friends.

Think about it. While we might think social success looks like an endless envy-inducing Instagram feed, isn’t it actually about connecting with other people in a way that feeds your soul?

For some, social media is the place where your ‘psyche’ and ‘social capital’ by virtue of your relationship traces is stripped and searched, and reduced to data that is aggregated, sliced, diced and ‘used’ to mint money or mold minds. Isn’t it a strange feeling when Facebook enters your private address book with WhatsApp. To some, this gives rise to the notion of users losing control of their information to advertisers and third-party platforms.

Take a pause. What happens to the invasion of privacy as the uninhibited culture of 'say everything' from vacations to break-ups to what I had for dinner last night? Careless self-revelations have run havoc in the past. Careers have been ruined, childhoods and marriages destroyed, privacy invaded and exploited, all in the name of sharing.

Did you hear this? Recently, a counter movement of users has formed, deciding to leave social networks by quitting their accounts (i.e., virtual identity suicide) driven by privacy concerns.

What’s on your mind?  Whatever…Who cares? Love it or hate it, you can’t avoid a date with Miss Social.

The Blogger is Kiran Kumar Yellupula:  The views expressed here are purely personal. Please share your feedback at mediavalue@yahoo.com