Dear Friends, with technological advancement, stressed lives, heavy traffic and distances with in the city, social networking sites like Facebook , twitter etc are becoming the fastest mode of communication and expression. A decade ago mobile replaced greeting cards and telegrams and now these sites have replaced mobile phones, and reduced the personal touch to minimal.

Although these sites have helped in saving a lot of time, but where are we utilizing this saving? The time we save is either utilized at the work place or by surfing these sites slowly getting part of this perfect world.

What is a perfect World?

In economics markets are described as Perfectly competitive and imperfectly competitive markets.

As per definition, a perfectly competitive market is a theoretical situation in which

1) All the products are homogenous and abundant in supply, there cannot be a demand constraint.

2) There are abundant buyers and sellers and none has the capacity to control the market. In simple words people are good at heart.

3) No restriction on entry exit and 4) All the information is publicly available. To summarise, it’s a kind of ‘ RAMRAJYA AND PRAJA SUKHI” Or “ SATYUG’ kind of market. On the other side imperfect competition is just opposite to it (KALYUG).

In practice a perfect market never exist, we all live in a imperfect market.

Social networking space is like a perfect world.

1) There is abundant supply of contacts. Friends of friends and so on. Even School kids have hundreds of contacts.

2) All information is publicly available.

3) Everybody is homogenous Ie good at heart, LIKE’s your opinions, Patriotic, give importance to values and teaching of great people like gandhiji, Anna and others. Everybody is against corruption and feels that black money should come back to India etc.

4) As good and responsible citizens each of us use our right to LIKE and Right to SHARE honestly. After sharing Annas cause against corruption or writing against congress/BJP all of us feels that we have discharged our duties and a SHARE/LIKE/COMMENT Iis the solution to all problems

5) If there are differences, they should not be shared on wall. Everybody is well mannered.

6) From morning to evening everybody is busy pasting quotations copied from Google and
counting LIKE’s posted by others without reading and understanding the meaning.

In practice there is no perfect world. The people who run the system are elected by people who come from an imperfect world.

This new form of society has confined itself to like or dislike, I am afraid we are losing personal touch no matter we are 24*7 online. In coming years most of us will see our next generation only through a mobile upload.

Contributed by Rahul Singhvi  (Batch 2002, IBS Ahmedabad)