000. Here's Where The Story Starts
I don’t want to start with the platitude that the world is so interconnected, but I realized I kind of have to—this is why I started this blog—to post my analysis of the world that captures the connections, communications, and conflicts between people and to depicts how things are intertwined and inter-tangled from the perspective of quantitative data analysis. I will primarily focus on social media analysis because that’s where my interest lies, what I have been doing for a while and probably what I will do in the future. It’s always fascinating for me to distance myself from the hustle and bustle of social media and just to observe it as an outsider—to observe the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, and the light and the darkness.
I cannot find a better name for this blog other than the one you see right now; it is called Indra’s Net. Originated from Buddhism, the concept was used to draw the analogy to the philosophical idea of Pratītyasamutpāda, or dependent arising. In simple words, the world is like a web where every knot is tied with jewels. The jewels shine with other jewels’ shines, and they reflect each other. These jewels, in a Buddhist eye, is dharma, which refers to all the phenomena of the world; while in my eyes, they are like humans, and our interactions are just like the shines. They not only display how an individual wants to present oneself to the world, but also reflect each other’s behaviors and actions. They not only show us the ins and outs of the virtual world, but also act a window to peek into our offline world. They not only reflect what’s going on in the offline world, but also they actively project ray of lights to the offline world, to our reality, and perpetuate the cycle. It’s all interconnected. It’s the world.
I might not have intimate knowledge of social sciences nor the slickest skills of data science, but I hope the analysis that I share here could at least inform you of the world we are living in. I wish it becomes a jewel on your knowledge net that sheds some lights into your inner world.