Genre: Digital technological fiction/science and
communication
Pages: 134
Edition:
paperback, kindle
Publisher: Papertowns
Publishers
Publication year: 2020
RATING: ☆☆☆ 1/2 (3.5/5)
“When Nokia launched their cell phone for the first time,
their tagline was ‘connecting people’. That was a noble objective. Now, it has
become connecting virtual people at the cost of real people.”
The book is an eye-opener in terms of social media influence over middle-aged people and millennials alike. The author delivers a complete package in which he puts forwards arguments against social media craze and virtual reality addiction, and also creates a fictional storyline to establish its perils. The story unfolds with three college friends Sandeep, Satvik and Ashok reuniting in a vacation in Goa. In between the fun and frolic, they begin discussing about the social media dominance in our lives, and the slow shift from conventional modes of communication to ‘one-click’ real-time online conversations over a virtual interface that had taken place in their generation. Tugged by childhood memories and nostalgia, they find themselves at varying stages of this smartphone addiction. As they judge the recent market craze and steep futuristic growth of the smartphone communication industry, the friends come up with the idea of a new social interaction app called Paybook. What makes this app different from the social media giant Facebook, is that Paybook works through remuneration. Users and content creators will be able to earn money in the form of virtual currencies that they’ll be able to redeem after periods of time. Being a fresh and unheard concept and promising a very steep acceptance rate, Paybook gains fast recognition. But soon hurdles appear in their path. On one side, the government IT department wants to censor the app to stop false propaganda, and on the other side, business organizations worldwide offer to buy the large catalogue of personal data and sensitive information that the app had managed to accumulate due to its constant usage by common men. But all hell breaks loose when its soon discovered that the app is slowly turning into a base to launch illegal businesses and is facilitating the infiltration of several anti-national groups. Amidst shocking revelations concerning the trio, will the business be able to stand and surpass the huge debt it was in?
The book focuses on various digital hazards that has the potential to shake the foundation of the 21st century. Being an expert in the communication and technological industry, the author has molded the fictional story in such a way that it runs into various prevalent dangers of the social media industry and exposes the adverse effects of it. The writing is backed up by power-packed, impeccable research on the history and future predictions of social media and virtual reality, and the seepage of this industry into other domains like behavioral science, cognitive science, psychology and non-technical job markets. Towards the end of the book the author sheds light to a way in which we can come out of this addiction and hence avoid its various ill consequences. With the incessant descriptions of social media hazards that an inexperienced reader might not be able to fully relate to, the actual plot-driven storyline often suffers. The pace of the story loses its consistency amidst the rampant conversational revelations that occurs throughout the book. These conversations are sometimes extremely long and one-sided and so they can’t give the flavour of an actual dialogical scenario. The over-pumping of technical details and subject-oriented matter makes the writing style a little too hectic to grasp in certain areas. Leaving aside the article-like look of the book’s content, the main story lacked a concrete climax. The crises that were established in the book promised of a very engaging plot denouement, but it was somehow dodged and not sufficiently addressed. The whole ‘digital detox’ and ‘mindfullnes’ part of the story that slowly carries the readers towards the end of the book seemed far-fetched and overstretched.
In all, I felt that the book had the capacity to deliver a great, wholesome content; but it somehow lost its way as it went on. The alarming research statistics and descriptions of the traps social media is laying before the current generation has been tactfully highlighted. I’d recommend this book to all kinds of readers, just because it talks about an issue that is slowly engulfing us in its shadowy influence.
Title:
Writing style: ☆☆☆☆ (4/5)
Plot:
Characterization: ☆☆ (2/5)
Overall impact:
Engrossing factor: ☆☆ 1/2 (2.5/5)
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