STREISAND EFFECT , SELF GOAL BY KARTI CHIDAMBARAM- CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

STREISAND EFFECT,  HOW INTERNET DOES NOT FOLLOW NEWTONS THIRD LAW -  CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

Only in this Digital Age and with the Internet information super highway could the Streisand Effect exist. 

The nature of social media ( with shares and retweets giving information ze perpetual life )  makes the Streisand Effect more ubiquitous than ever.

So, what is this "Streisand effect" - meme,  all about ?

Barbara Streisand’s lawyers tried to force Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com to remove a photo of her palatial Malibu home,  that was among a collection of 12,000 photos of the California coastline. 

The photo had been accessed six times when the lawsuit was filed, four times by her own lawyer.  After news of the lawsuit went national, the photo was viewed nearly 500,000 times. 

This was not even some frisky paparazzo taking pictures specifically of her goodies –nay—nose, while at the pool side. Rather, it was part of the California Coastal Records Project, a government-commissioned photographic study of the entire California coast.  And she sued for 50 million daallerzs.

Adding insult to injury, the lawsuit was thrown out. TEE HEEEE!!

The term is a modern expression of the older phenomenon that banning or censoring something often makes that item or information more desirable, and leads to it being actively sought out to a greater extent than it would have otherwise been— and with large hearted Internet available, it goes viral.

How people organically talk about you, your company, your brand or your bank balance, doesn’t make or break your reputation in this Digital Age — 

Till then nobody gave a dang about Barbara baby, her weird nose and her fancy bungalow on the cliff.

An industrialist was arrested on Tuesday on charges of posting "offensive remarks" on Union finance minister P Chidambaram's son Karti Chidambaram on micro-blogging site Twitter. 

S Ravi, 46, in a tweet on October 19 2012,  alleged that Karti Chidambaram had "amassed" more wealth than Robert Vadra, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law.  

Karti Chidambaram lodged a complaint and Ravi was booked under Section 66 (1) (hacking with computer system) of the Information Technology Act.  

Police arrested Ravi and produced him before chief judicial magistrate, who granted him bail. If convicted, the industrialist faces imprisonment up to three years or a fine or both. 

This is a self inflicted goal.   In a single stroke, Karti has ensured that his father will NOT win the next elections in 2014 — and he has also ensured that from now on , the whole of India will be keeping a hawk’s eye on his “business” dealings.  

This man Ravi had a Twitter following of 12, out of which half were his relatives. Today every Indian who watches TV knows our man Ravi-- and poor Thiru Karti has painted himself into a corner..

This planet is now obsessed with the latest celebrity gossip,  a gross dislike for brutal censorship from uppity folks, and then there is always this delicious innate human inquisitiveness. There aint no goin’ back—it is for keeps!.

The faster apna Karti baby knows and understands this new founded Internet thingy the better. 

Suppress to exacerbate, is the name of this Internet mantra.

Well, ladies and gentlemen , this is the miserable condition of India in 2012. 

We Indians claim to be the world’s largest democracy, yet we choose among rotten eggs.  

Every country on this planet knows how much inner party democracy there is in India, when it comes to major decisions like choosing the President of India or the Prime Minister of India or high profile cabinet Ministers — leave alone Indians.  

The Streisand effect is an internet-coined name ( although the effect predates the popular usage of the internet ) for a PARADOX phenomenon whereby an attempt to censor or gag a report has led to great interest in the story or work that nobody would have noticed , had they not attempted to ban or censor the story or work.

In the modern world of blogs, there are no shortages of such examples,  as blogs have become a main means whereby people speak out, and often have a network of friends or collaborators just waiting to get pissed off - if one is censored, it will quickly be picked up by another, and then it snowballs. 

Censorship on Internet, is obviously seen as an assault on -nay -assassination of free speech, and it is usually this aspect that attracts the attention, rather than the nature of the story itself - indeed, many of the stories are downright boring compared to the ensuing sh#tstorm about censorship.

There is no law out there that is a silver bullet for getting rid of everything you don’t like on the Web and that, if you try to treat it as such, there’s a decent chance that you could find out just how difficult it is to make the Web bend to your will ( and how hard it can snap back and bloody your nose and your personal brand ).

Punch into Google search “Santhosh Pandit” and you will find 7.6 millions posts.  Abhisekh Bachchan who has been in Bollywood movies for 12 years as a hero has only 2.9 million and that too, only because his name is associated with his more famous father, wife and mother. 

Pandit made a very bad Malayalam movie , and it got such bad reviews,  that it became a hit.  Cinema halls in Kerala are full -- all with young educated men. Women are afraid to go to the theatre , as the audience cheers , booes, claps and whistles throughout the movie. The movie is NONSENSE, and some guys wear motorcycle helmets to avoid being seen watching this crap. 

Santosh will even put the camera out of focus or off target to piss you off.  Suddenly you will see the grass and ants instead of the actor. And the people love him.  3 hours of unadulterated madness and crazed cheering from die hard fans- - better to do so than squirm in your seats, right? 

You must understand that Kerala movie going public is generally more intelligent than the rest of India. That is why when the whole of India burns with race and religions riots,  nothing happens here. 

His dialogues are ridiculous.  He takes Plain Jane heroines. He cant sing for nuts, yet he sings all the songs in his movies.  Santosh Pandit with a 4 decades “misplaced back in time fashion sense” is the hero in all his movies.  

He is targeted on face book and twitter.  When he goes to inaugurate show rooms people throw eggs on him.  

Since the advent of DVDs' cinema halls running mainstream Malayalam movies with mega heroes are rarely houseful. 

The proof of a pudding lies in the eating—every Master Chef knows that.  Nobody is gonna eat it if he is gonna puke and choke on it.  After eating too many rasgollas , we sometimes crave for a chilly Kondattam.

During the last Michael Jackson trial, Tonight Show host Jay Leno made the requisite jokes about Jackson being a pedophile, and Jackson obtained a gag order on the grounds that Leno was a witness in the case. The judge eventually ruled that Leno could make jokes about Jackson as long as he didn't discuss his testimony. 

Meanwhile, Leno circumvented the order by having guest comedians come on and make the jokes for him, and celebrated the lifting of the gag order by doing a monologue consisting entirely of jokes about Michael Jackson.

Ryan Giggs was already world famous as a footballer for Manchester United - and then he decided to take on Twitter. He sued the site after a user revealed that he was the subject of an anonymous privacy injunction - commonly known as a super-injunction - preventing the publication of details regarding an alleged affair with model Imogen Thomas. 

In the video below Hilter's secretary has a secret affair with Giggs--TEE HEEEE! ( hope Giggs will NOT sue me ) 

Ryan Giggs's attempts to hide his identity in the story of his alleged affair were scuppered by Twitter. 

However, this legal action greatly offended the "twitterati" or at least 75,000 of them, who subsequently retweeted - or republished - Giggs's name and affair claim around the site. It posed a challenge to Giggs and to the law, to see if they were both willing to chase an ever-growing number of microbloggers for their publication of his name in this particular context.

Hey, Karti saar, and Chid paaji,  sometimes it's best to pick your battles, or platform using wisdom, like Bill Clinton of Monika Lewisnky fame . 

Who ever knew of a folk hero Aseem Trivedi , the quintessential average cartoonist, before he was arrested for --hold your breath-- sedition ?  He is now strutting around in shiny pointy shoes , in the house of Bigg Boss 6.

Who ever heard of a tsunami in India till 2004.  Thanks to you, in India we shall rename Streisand effect as THE Karti effect.

Streisand Effect usually starts with social media and spread to mainstream media. Obviously, targeting someone who is social media savvy increases the risk of a spectacular domino Streisand Effect.

How you respond in a mature and intelligent manner, to the way people talk about your personal brand has a much greater effect on your reputation.  

It is a daunting task with today’s unfathomably massive and torrential flow of Internet  information to direct or control a message.  In more cases than not, it’s more effective to embrace the way people are talking about you, if you are in public life.  

People do NOT believe everything what is printed in the "free for all" Internet maidan --   unless they are idiots of the first order !!  

Internet is NOT a peer reviewed magazine owned by Rothschild.  This is the charm of the electronic social media. 

Some time I myself make an aggressive comment on the Internet and derive a lot of fun, when people respond like dorks in a knee jerk manner.  In fact my last line would be ‘DORKS SHALL FETCH' – it requires intelligence to understand this ( ever heard of a dog fetching what you have thrown –or an echo ?) .  

Like what the saint in the graveyard, told Amitabh Bachchan  (holding a dead Rekha in his arm s)  in the Bollywood movie Mukkaddar Ka Sikkandar— dard ko gale se lagaa, dard ko apna le beta !.

Would anybody have known about  Salman Rushdie's and his verbose and complex The Satanic Verses , ever?   This spooky loonin’ guy became a celebrity , got invites to the Queen’s box, got for himself  a fortune and wrangled an attractive wife. Any attempt at suppressing some books turned them into instant best-sellers.

In October 2009, Ralph Lauren issued a DMCA complaint against Photoshop Disasters for criticising and reposting some of their advertising. Although the company later apologised for the shoddy photoshopping, they went and did an encore a few weeks later.  

If there is a fine they will pay it,  if they have to go to jail they will gladly go skippety skip.  

They cannot give you 100 lashes , or cut off your family jewels, in the year 2012 , right?  

See in business and politics, nothing succeeds like success.

So-called "gag orders" and "super injunctions" are designed by courts to limit the effect. These orders prevent the press not just from reporting an incident, but also from reporting or hinting that they've been prevented from reporting it!  These are often used in privacy or libel battles, but if overturned or lifted, the Streisand Effect is free to come out in full force.  

Indeed, it often comes out in fuller force thanks to the nature of the super-injunctions limits on free speech.  Applying for, and failing to achieve, a super-injunction in court often leads to greater publicity for a scandal.

In December 2010, the website WikiLeaks was the subject of DoS attacks and rejection from ISPs as a consequence of the United States cable leaks.  People sympathetic to WikiLeaks' cause and admiring Julian Assange’s bal#s of steel , which clanged to create sparks, voluntarily mirrored the website in order to make it impossible for any one person to completely remove the cables.

Kim Kardashian has lately being staging ze “ Streisand effect in reverse” , with her leaked sex tapes, starring herself and  well endowed rapper Ray J.   

Do we look stupid to you, Kim, baby ?  

Did you say Yeah?  

Ok then-- where is mE banana ?

Streisand Effects are most common when the person doing the silencing is seen as either being a “high and mighty” corrupt man silencing a smaller one or someone who is otherwise abusing power.  While this isn’t always true,  most who fall victim to the effect are either celebrities or large gung ho companies.

No one likes censorship—especially on the Internet.  Transparency is the expectation, and when that is challenged,  the outcome seldom favors those trying to suppress the information. The bitter lesson is that you can no longer hide from the truth on the net. 

Those in public life with no truth to hide from will be fine. But those who try beware: The Streisand effect looms large. Nobody targets a nice private citizen.

Here is the psychology , all free .  All humans have innate inquisitiveness programmed into their DNA . When this curiosity is mixed with a fear of missing the bus, the sneaky feeling something is being hidden from them or that someone is overacting to something, it can cause individuals to react in mischievous ways that others will support.  

Add to this combination with a natural dislike for censorship from evil brands or uppity corrupt power broking individuals – it becomes a heady mix .

Psychologists have done studies and found that the subjects' desire for any kind of potentially censor-able material increased when the subjects were told that it was censored.  The old Forbidden Fruit principle in action, in other words.  

Banning any discussion or otherwise trying to close down a discussion will typically serve only to make more people aware of it.  The ‘banning’ becomes the new story and a much bigger and more important discussion.  People forget and do NOT care was the original bu##shit discussion was all about.

People will continue to discuss things online, as humans tend to disagree. They will discuss issues which may not be in consonance with your  preferred line of thinking.  Many of these harmless discussions will be between small groups of people , and it dies a natural death after it runs out of passion,  or steam.  

You will only give it a much larger undeserving audience and convert it to a growing deadly hurricane ( which may consume you and your personal brand ) if you join try to throw a high profile spanner in the works, in a “take me if you can” or “don’t mess with me” manner. 

If Sarah Palin were to sue people the way Thiru Karti Saar did, she would have to live for 500 years. 

CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

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