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Good Morning
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2022-05-23 at 12:37 PM UTC
Millions of Indians are getting online for the first time—and they are filling up the internet. Many like nothing better than to begin the day by sending greetings from their phones. Starting before sunrise and reaching a crescendo before 8 a.m., internet newbies post millions of good-morning images to friends, family and strangers.
All that good cheer is driving a 10-fold increase in the number of Google searches for “Good Morning images” over the past five years. Pinterest, the San Francisco visual-search platform, added a new section to display images with quotes. It saw a ninefold increase over the past year in the number of people in India downloading such pictures.
Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp messaging service—which has 200 million monthly active users in India, making the country its biggest market—added a status message last year so users could say good morning to all of their contacts at once.
Desh Raj Sharma, 71 years old, recently started using a smartphone. At around 6 a.m. every day he searches for and sends good-morning images to more than 50 friends and family using WhatsApp.
In one recent dispatch, a toddler sporting a fedora and holding his hand over his chest says, “Our heart is the only thing in the world that works without any rest. So keep it happy, whether it is yours or your dear one’s. Good Morning.”
In another, an image of Krishna, the Hindu god of love, is paired with the words “Good Morning. Silent prayers often reach God faster, because they are not bound by the weight of words."
“These WhatsApp messages are really my thoughts put into words," said Mr. Sharma.
Perhaps India’s most famous morning-message enthusiast is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He gets up at 5 a.m. to practice yoga and is known to fire off good-morning messages as the sun is rising. Last year, he admonished a group of lawmakers for not responding to his greetings.
Bonding with large groups through work, school, family and friend circles is important for Indians. This is one reason wedding celebrations often involve hundreds if not thousands of guests. That tendency has been given new fuel in the form of affordable smartphones and wireless broadband.
Some complain all these greetings come too early, are too cheery and too likely to freeze their low-cost, low-memory phones. To deal with the annoying morning cheer, some leave message groups or refuse to download the images.
Mr. Sharma’s niece, 24-year-old Prerna Sharma, says she respects her uncle and is glad he is excited about technology—but she has had enough from him and her other relatives who send morning messages every day.
“They’ll call you and say, ‘did you see that good morning?’ ” she said, and she doesn’t know what to say because she rarely reads them. “Most of the time my notifications are on mute.”
Popular Indian comedy group “All India Bakchod” addressed the issue in an October skit. A bedraggled man plays the role of WhatsApp, driven to exhaustion by a demanding mother who orders him to deliver morning messages to friends and family who ignore the messenger.
When Google researchers peeked into Indian consumers’ phones, they found thousands of “good morning” images gumming up their storage. One in three smartphone users in India run out of space daily, according to a survey by data-storage firm Western Digital Corp. , compared with one in 10 in the U.S.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-internet-is-filling-up-because-indians-are-sending-millions-of-good-morning-texts-1516640068 -
2022-05-23 at 12:39 PM UTCGood morning send bobs
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2022-05-23 at 12:53 PM UTC
