News Brief: What’s in a meme

While politicians of our era might consider social media to be the best thing to have happened to them, here's at least one person who thinks it has done more harm than good. During the launch of a book, The Real Face of Facebook in India, in the capital on Tuesday, Delhi University professor and public intellectual Apoorvanand pointed out how one of the problems with Facebook is that it has reduced public conversations to memes. And memes, in turn, have reduced the whole discipline of public debate into a game one-upmanship. "Phrases like aag laga di (destroying something) or khaat khadi kar di (putting someone in great trouble) have entered the discourse, which is not a good thing," he said. The book has been authored jointly by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Cyril Sam and, as the name suggests, talks about the hidden dangers of Facebook.