Why am I dying?

I have no reason to believe that I will die. In about 20 years, when I am closer to dying (I will be 55, then), I expect the Stem Cell Technology to have improved, with scope to extend the lifetime of an adult human being to 200+ years. That’s why we have lots of potted plants in our house – we don’t want to be running short on ‘Stems’ when the need arises.

But then I think, Stem Cell technology or no Stem cell techonology….why wouldn’t I die? I mean, they say God is dead. If God can be dead….why can’t Jammy be dead? But then again, when I think that Elvis isn’t dead….I wonder, why would Jammy be dead?

If I am not going to die due to natural causes (thanks to Stem Cell Technology & all those plants that I am growing at home), will I end up committing suicide? Hmm….let me think….maybe not. Primarily because I live my life with the help of Do-It-Yourself books and books on ‘How to commit suicide’ are never available in libraries. Apparently, nobody ever returns them. Some of the other books that don’t get returned are ‘How to make a bomb,’ ‘How to murder your mother-in-law’ and ‘How to tame a lion in one hour’.

For the sake of moving this article forward, let us assume that Jammy dies. And when that happens, people who didn’t even know that Jammy lived…will be informed that Jammy has died. As one of my favourite humor writer GK Chesterton once said: “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

The big question is, how would the Television Channels and Newspapers and Weekly Magazines handle my death? I know I am not famous right now, but let us assume for the sake of this article that in 20 years time I am famous. Will I make it to the cover of the magazines? If yes, will they cover my coffin and then take a picture or will they move the lid across and show my drop-dead-gorgeous face? What about the Television Channel – will they run 30-minute slots titled “A day with Jammy inside his coffin” or maybe “Jammy’s funeral wardrobe – how to get dressed for that last journey”.

Me dying, how will it affect me

If I die today, I will hold many grudges when I roam around in my ghost form. I have never managed to get a statue of mine erected in the middle of a traffic junction. I have never managed to get a park or a bus stand or a wedding hall or a road named after me. I didn’t get a college auditorium named “Lord Jammy’s Auditorium”.

Another grudge I will nurse will be that of not finishing my autobiography. I shouldn’t have listened to Kushwant Singh and agreed that the best time to write an autobiography is after death. Coz, after death I might find out that there are no pens and no paper. Besides, how do you find publishers willing to publish your articles after you are dead….if finding them when you are alive is so difficult.

Me dying, how does it affect my family

There will be two parties most affected by my death – my daughter and the pet honeybee we have in our house. Honeybee will get over it in a week’s time and die in the next one month (yes, they live only for up to 40 days).

My daughter will miss me for sure. I will miss her too. But being the ghost, I will be able to tag along with her to her school ….and not leave the sight of her….something that I am unable to do now. So, this will work out as a huge advantage.

On the other hand, my wife Rekha will rush to the newspaper to give my obituary in newspaper. She will want to make it official as soon as possible, and to that affect will also apply for the death certificate. I also see her rushing to the cupboard in the bedroom and calculating the amount LIC owes her.

Coming back to the Obituary in the newspaper, she will stick to the smallest obituary ever because of the cost involved. This is how I see the conversation going:

Rekha: My husband died this morning, and I want a nice big obituary. How much will it cost?

Editor: Madam, our condolences.

Rekha: But can you match your condolence with a discount?

Editor: No madam. Our festival season is over. We can’t offer you a discount. But if you want, you can reduce the number of words so you have to pay less.

Rekha: How about “Jammy dies”?

Editor: I am sorry madam, but we have a minimum limit of ten words for Obituaries.

Rekha: Ohh, then let us make it: “Jammy dies. 2006 Suzuki Swift & 1998 Yamaha 135cc for sale.

Me dying, how does it affect my colleagues

For my colleagues at ibibo, it will be a very nice thing. My death, that is.

Here are some conversations I can see happen the day news of my death appears in the newspapers and Television channels:

Colleague 1: Gagan, so who is getting Jammy’s car parking slot?

Gagan: I donno. He just died this morning and his car is still parked in his slot….so lets talk about this in a few days.

Colleague 1: If I can get the keys from Rekha, and park his car out on the road…does that help you?

Gagan: It does. But isn’t it a little insensitive?

Colleague 1: We can tell Rekha that she might need the car for running around, and drop it at their home. Then it won’t be insensitive.

Gagan: Wow….if you can do that, the parking slot is yours.

——–X——-X———
Colleague 2: Good riddance. Isn’t he?

Colleague 3: Ohh yeah. But I wish it wasn’t so sudden.

Colleague 2: But I thought you hated him?

Colleague 3: That’s why I didn’t want it to be sudden. I wanted him to suffer for long and then die.

——–X——-X———

Colleague 4: Hi, Jammy is dead huh?

HR: Yeah. Too bad.

Colleague 4: Yeah. He isn’t coming back…is he?

HR: Obviously not.

Colleague 4: If you are so sure, can I sit at his desk. It has good vastu – he got promoted very often…didn’t he?

HR: He hasn’t even cleared his desk yet. All his papers are still there. Besides, he hasn’t even been buried yet.

Colleague 4: He isn’t going to get up again…is he? Also, now that he is dead…does anybody care about his social networking strategies?

HR: You got a point. Go ahead and shift.

——–X——-X———

Colleague 5: Hi Pratap!

Pratap: Hi. Heard the news?

Colleague 5: Yep. That’s why I have come to you for.

Pratap: Tell me.

Colleague 5: Can I use his Sony Viao?

Pratap: Come on man…he hasn’t even been dead 10 hours yet. And you want his laptop?

Colleague 5: Yeah. I know it’s a little insensitive, but if I didn’t somebody else would.

Pratap: Ok fine, here is the deal. If you can recover the laptop for me from his house, you get to have it.

Colleague 5: Done deal.

Cross-Sectional Surveys

Cross-sectional surveys are used to gather information on a population at a single point in time. An example of a cross sectional survey would be a questionaire that collects data on how parents feel about Internet filtering, as of March of 1999. A different cross-sectional survey questionnaire might try to determine the relationship between two factors, like religiousness of parents and views on Internet filtering.

Longitudinal Surveys

Longitudinal surveys gather data over a period of time. The researcher may then analyze changes in the population and attempt to describe and/or explain them. The three main types of longitudinal surveys are trend studies, cohort studies, and panel studies.

Trend Studies

Trend studies focus on a particular population, which is sampled and scrutinized repeatedly. While samples are of the same population, they are typically not composed of the same people. Trend studies, since they may be conducted over a long period of time, do not have to be conducted by just one researcher or research project. A researcher may combine data from several studies of the same population in order to show a trend. An example of a trend study would be a yearly survey of librarians asking about the percentage of reference questions answered using the Internet.

Cohort Studies

Cohort studies also focus on a particular population, sampled and studied more than once. But cohort studies have a different focus. For example, a sample of 1999 graduates of GSLIS at the University of Texas could be questioned regarding their attitudes toward paraprofessionals in libraries. Five years later, the researcher could question another sample of 1999 graduates, and study any changes in attitude. A cohort study would sample the same class, every time. If the researcher studied the class of 2004 five years later, it would be a trend study, not a cohort study.

Panel Studies

Panel studies allow the researcher to find out why changes in the population are occurring, since they use the same sample of people every time. That sample is called a panel. A researcher could, for example, select a sample of UT graduate students, and ask them questions on their library usage. Every year thereafter, the researcher would contact the same people, and ask them similar questions, and ask them the reasons for any changes in their habits. Panel studies, while they can yield extremely specific and useful explanations, can be difficult to conduct. They tend to be expensive, they take a lot of time, and they suffer from high attrition rates. Attrition is what occurs when people drop out of the study.

Respondents to this survey were not selected on a random basis. Announcements for the online survey were posted to mailing lists within MIT as well as on a few high-traffic blogs published by people known to the author of this survey. The viral nature of blogs meant that the links to the survey page quickly spread to many other blogs. Nevertheless, this does not qualify as a random sample of the blogger population and, as such, the results from this survey cannot be generalized to the entire blogging community; instead, these results are representative of the state of affairs in certain portions of the blogging world.

Blogs, more formally known as weblogs, have captivated the media and, by extension, the public’s imagination. The number of blog writers and readers has grown consistently in the last few years.¹ Moreover, blogs are permeating most niches of social life, addressing a range of topics from scholarly and political issues (Glenn, 2003) to family and children’s daily lives (Turnbull, 2004). As blog writers become increasingly prolific, however, they are likely to encounter issues of privacy and liability. For example, accounts of bloggers hurting friends’ feelings or losing their jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent (Bray, 2004; Nussbaum, 2004; O’Shea, 2003; Pax, 2003; Phillips, 2003; Sarnataro, 2003; St. John, 2003; Whitworth, 2003).

Because blogging has the power to affect not only the lives of bloggers themselves but also of the people, companies, and products that are “blogged,” it is important to understand how accountability and privacy expectations function in this emergent arena. This article reports on the results of a survey of blog authors’ subjective sense of privacy and their perceptions of liability as regards the content of their weblogs. Its primary goal is to introduce privacy concerns into the ongoing academic discussion of blogging practices. An additional goal is to describe bloggers’ current expectations as regards privacy and liability for purposes of comparison with future phases of blogging activity.

The findings of this survey suggest that self-imposed social norms are emerging among weblog authors. For instance, bloggers are beginning to create informal guidelines for publishing the names of people and companies in their blog entries. For the most part, however, authors have no way of knowing who their readers are—a situation that has serious implications for both privacy and accountability. At the time of this study, most blog hosting services—with the exception of LiveJournal, which is discussed in the survey—did not provide authors with mechanisms for articulating distinct audiences for different entries. A significant portion of problems reported by the participants in the survey stems from lack of control over who has access to their writings.

The next section of this article provides background information on privacy issues in relation to blogging. The following sections explain the methodology used in the online survey and describe the results from the study. A discussion section follows, where the results are interpreted in light of the existing literature on blogging practices. Finally, the concluding remarks summarize the major findings and point to the need for further work in this area.