The Asocial Networking by Dhiraj Kumar – Review

When the very first chapter begins with these lines, you can gauge the leanings of the author. Of course the title says it all ‘The Asocial Networking’ , so there is almost no  ‘likes’ buttons here for social networking – just a musings on the real and online worlds that almost screams to ‘Shift+Delete’ all kinds of online social networking to save the humanity and re-establish the glorious paradise that we lost. Along the crusade, to his credit Dhiraj does manage to bring wry humour in plenty throughout the 320 pages of this  ‘in-depth’ treatise on the effects and after-effects of Facebook inspite of it being a serious musings or better can be summed up as the author’s rantings.

If someone jokingly mentions Mark Zuckerberg that the book ‘The Asocial Networking’ might be a main cause of all the investor worries and the downfall of Facebook’s shares, he might actually believe if he reads it. Such is the trident assault on Facebook that it made me think Dhiraj Kumar, the author of the book could have very well named the book ‘The Faceless Book’ or something like that to make his musings more profoundly made clear.  One of the biggest asocial points of the musings is making Facebook a satanic incarnation that is intoxicating the entire civilization and threatening the very mankind and by analysing like a tarot reader the personality of the facebook users in an alarmingly absurd way in most parts. Making sweeping generalizations of user behaviours and making microscopic analysis of people’s online behaviour over 150 chapters without any scientific basis or proper studies but purely based on his lopsided pre-conceived notion does not make for any rational casestudy. Having said it, the absurdities and logical fallacies also makes at times for sly humour. Never mind that Social Networking is not be all, end all with Facebook and there is a whole gamut of Social Networking sites and platforms and even niche networking sites, conveniently forget that there is a pros and cons in all the developments in human history, forget that social engagement has always been a dynamic and evolving trend – Dhiraj’s musings is cynical, blatantly anti-social networking (read: facebook). To top it all, he  seriously analysis the personality traits of the Facebook users based on their posts, frequency of updates, likes, comments, photos and what not you and me do on my wall, your wall and everyone’s wall.  Let me just warn you, don’t take the musings seriously and do a self-analysis – it might seriously be self-damaging if you are a weakling.

As a closing status update ‘The Asocial Networking’ is an unintentionally funny and amusing rant which does not hide its one-sided umpiring.  And all those who lost some dollors in Facebook IPO, you can send a copy of this book to Mark just to irritate him a bit!