A Social Media Example: Looking For V.S. Naipaul

October 20, 2009 by Taran Rampersad

In the heels of my last post about Facebook being a walled garden, I decided to play around a little last night. The muse was Karel McIntosh's post on Caribbean Celebrities on Twitter.

Of course, I had to make it amusing just to make it interesting for myself and so I went off looking for V.S. Naipaul on Twitter. After all, that idea seems so outrageous that I doubt anyone ever checked. Unsurprisingly, he's not tweeting - at least as V.S. Naipaul. Had I found him on Twitter I probably would have gone into shock. 

140 characters just doesn't seem like something he'd be too awfully interested in expressing himself in.

So I poked around a bit more. I checked Flickr for images of V.S. Naipaul, and that netted a fair amount of images of the Nobel Laureate. That also netted the image you see above. Georgia Popplewell over at CaribbeanFreeRadio.com was kind enough not only to post the image, but to make it available through a Creative Commons license - so that I can share it with you.

There were other photos, even a shot of a statues nether region, but the one I used was the one I could legally use. The one under a Creative Commons license. Because of it, Georgia's images are likely to become the most used of Sir V.S. Naipaul within Social Media... unless others get captures of the Nobel Laureate out in the wild.

The other images largely exist in a legal walled garden; I couldn't use them without the person's permission which could have taken days to get. Thanks, Georgia!

So... what about YouTube? A search of YouTube for V.S. Naipaul netted a few videos, but only one of V.S. Naipaul. Here it is, his Nobel Banquet Speech:

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