What’s going on?

I waste time. The sentence written with disgust and weariness means exactly what it means. That time is one thing in this world that exists as a permanent itch that you can choose to scratch or just pretend it doesn’t exist. Musicians have sung about it, philosophers thought about it and preachers preached about it. Even in Einstein’s world of relativity time can be only perceived as a constant. And I waste it. So logic has it that I was useless and purposeless for those few minutes I choose not to scratch.

But there exist something more profound more complicated that makes time so abstract.

For if my life is limited on this planet then so is my time. Then wasting time means wasting precious seconds of existence. For those of us who think man (wait the feminists are protesting) or humans were created for a purpose, the precious seconds wasted could dent a hole in the overall picture of gods plan. Or if you are an atheist, it’s a hole in life’s plan. But if human life were purposeless just a dialectical circle of chaos then there ceases an importance of time.

I may have wasted my time writing this. But if intimate reflections like this are a waste of time then I choose to waste my time happily. That's me.

Where do I begin? Orkutting Ourselves to Death (Part 1)

I don't think I will never work on another research paper again. Its way too much work and I have a feeling that I won't ever stumble upon another topic just as interesting. Also I did this work because I had to (As a part of my Post Graduate requirement). Don't get me wrong- I will do research, but i will not put it down so systematically as I have done. So to enlighten the world I will release chapters of my work one at a time as 'Blogs' for the interested people to read. It will be a diluted version of my actual work because lets face it, attention spans are low for the average internet user.

The topic of the thesis is ‘Orkut net-community –The search for Virtual Relationships and a new cultural identity among the Youth Today’ was not just constructed on the eve our research assignment was given to us but over my postgraduate days of studying media and its effects. A direct result of many books and journals I had read on media and its effects. I disagreed with many theories especially on the understanding of the so called youth. I thought the theories were an over generalization and like a dejected adolescent I thought to myself ‘they don’t understand us’ (more on that later).

Then I stumbled on other theories by more recent researchers and authors and also on many articles (in newspapers and magazines) that constructed my ‘adolescent feelings’ into more organized ideas.

And this research assignment was an opportunity to explore these new theories and construct a better understanding of how media (or new media) has changed the face of the youth today. I will study how this new youth or the M generation[1] views online relationships, sexuality and purpose or meaning of life.

The research was done in two stages. In the first stage a questionnaire was prepared, circulated and collected. The data collected from this process was analyzed. And in the final stage relevant literature was reviewed in order to give meaning to the findings of this research.

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[1] India Today (20 Nov 2006) in their cover story “Wired Generation” use M generation to describe those born between 1985 and 1996