SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS IN 2011

Shahid Kapoor will finally spell a sentence on Twitter correctly

Men will finally realise that actual hot women have a life, don’t use the internet and cannot be found on social networks. They will continue asking for friendship anyway because importing inflatable dolls is too expensive.

Twitter users will finally realise that number of followers does not equal respect. This will be proved when less than 10 people watch Uday Chopra’s latest release despite him having 1 over lakh followers.

Facebook users will realise that it’s not cool to “Like” a status message about someone’s death.

Lalit Modi will use Youtube to give post-match analysis on every IPL game. He will then get punched by Navjot Sidhu for stealing his job.

Saffola will tie up with Facebook and have their logo next to every status update or comment stating “OMIGOD! I heart you!”

The Ministry of Health will ban 4Square after mistaking the service for a popular cigarette brand.

Facebook’s chat feature will be shut after people across the world realise their friend lists are full of people they don’t like talking to anyway.

Rajnikant and Kalmadi jokes will get a new lease of life as more and more middle-class Indians join Orkut and copy paste their SMS’s.

Mumbai citizens will discover that a MySpace account is the only space they can afford.

Cash or Credit will replace A/S/L.

Blogging in India will die a swift death after people realise that Amitabh Bachchan’s blog was actually being written by an out of work Jugal Hansraj.

FUCK IT!!! I'm going out. It's too expensive to stay home and watch TV.

I quit. No more entertainment for me. I can’t afford it. During every commercial break of every single cricket match, I am reminded that someone (usually Shah Rukh Khan) has a better TV than I do and is thus enjoying the match more than I am. Unless the Kolkata Knight Riders are playing.

The problem is this. Advertising insists that all entertainment these days is designed to be viewed on devices that are at least six generations ahead of whatever TV you currently own. And I can’t afford it anymore. Thanks to the arms-race that is entertainment technology, I’m broke. My bank account currently cries itself to sleep at night. Even the Lehmann Brothers account won’t hang out with it.

I am also reminded that I need a DTH cable connection, because with one of those little boxes, I could get CD quality sound and DVD quality picture-clarity. And if I throw in my other kidney too, they’ll give me a box that will even let me pause that seventh rerun of Friends so I can appreciate just how fat Matthew Perry really got. Except nobody in those ads has a TV like yours, which still occupies as much space as your car (you drive an SUV). No, people in those ads, they have flatscreen TVs, with tummies stretched so taut they make Shilpa Shetty cry. TVs that are “Full HD” and are clearer than anything else in the universe, including Hubble. And by some miracle of science (known to most as “Photoshop”), these TVs use absolutely no wires, and just levitate near the wall. And they have about fifteen speakers, and if you buy one, ever so often, Lady Gaga leaps out of the screen and actually sings at your house.
And so, because I am male, I march over to the shop to see how much one of those TV’s costs. The answer to this question is usually “More than I can afford.” Five minutes later, I leave with something twice as big. The salesman has used words like “HDMI”, and “1080p”, which, mind you, is “not the same as 1080i which is 0.0087 per cent more blurry than 1080p, and what? 720p? Ha! Sir we don’t sell those anymore! The antique store is around the corner!”
When the fog clears, I’m at home, saddled with a giant TV that looks like it’s shedding wires. And to use “HDMI” and get “1080p”, I need six other kinds of wire. Except my set-top box doesn’t use those wires, so everything looks just as rubbish as before. Even Shah Rukh Khan. And now I’ve realized that I don’t really know what the hell an “HDMI” is.
So, now I’ve got the best TV in the world (at least it was, until six minutes before I bought it) and no way of showing off its best-ness. To do this, I must buy a Blu-Ray player. No, not DVD. Blu-Ray. DVD is for losers. I can get DVD quality clarity from my little Shah Rukh Khan box, remember? I must get a Blu-Ray player. Which, what a coincidence, happens to be a Playstation.
And now, I must connect my computer to my TV as well, just because the manual says I can. In my experience, there is no real practical use for this. But, let’s not lose sight of what’s important here… it’s COOL! And now there are so many wires coming out of my TV that it looks like it has dreadlocks. And I am currently looking at this column on two screens, which is giving me a giant headache. But it is the coolest headache I have ever had.
In fact, I bet Shah Rukh Khan’s NEVER had a headache this cool.