On any given day, the citizens of the hi-fi generation spend a significant amount of time availing of the things that mobile internet and wi-fi provides. Logging into one or more forms of social media is an outcome of ready accessibility to the information highway.
I sympathize with myself when I analyze a typical day of unsocial things that I do on the so called social media. I use facebook and twitter to be uptodate with the demands of becoming a socially adequate citizen.
The first stroke of the day starts with me rolling my fingers across the smart phone in a certain pattern to unlock the phone that also symbolizes the fastidiousness with which I, like multiple millions across the world are enslaved by the social phenomenon. My eyes pry for the updates that have happened overnight, a quick glance at the electronic mails, odd short message service and the frequent updates on facebook in the form of notifications, messages and at times, tweets.
Looking for healthy updates on life, I plunge myself into the bare unnecessities of life. As I scroll down my page, I find it hard to see a familiar face. I wonder if it occurs only with me or is it the case with others as well. Courtesy to people posting their pictures as fit for public viewing, my early morning staple starts with a view of the updates and pictures of the Friends of Friends, some thing one of my friends would have liked which would in no way be connected to me. Having been served this pre-breakfast of unfamiliar faces, their lives, their view points, their celebrations and frustrations, I wonder what about the host of people whom I really know in my life. Why is it difficult to hear about them and why do I have to be subjected to updates about people whom I do not know.
At times, I delve deep into thoughts if a certain person has been known to me in any stage of my life from being a Nursery kid to a professional of this age, my fertile mind endowed with a good memory is not able to figure out how.
There, my mind sighs and contemplates on how to rectify this seemingly unwanted barrage of messages and updates about people whom I do not know, as I open my eyes and I frantically tighten my privacy settings on facebook so that nothing unwanted gets space on my wall. Due to the largesse of the ‘public’ nature of the posts of the Friends of Friends, they can not be denied space on my wall. The only way would be to stop receiving updates from my very true friends and that I think defeats the very purpose of me being on social media i.e. to get updates about the people who matter, without asking and poking my nose into their lives.
I manage to have a cursory glance on the list of my friends and the way I have interacted with them on social media. With about half of them, that runs into hundreds, I have never exchanged a hello in the chat box. Despite them having a green round button signalling that they are online, we never get to the point of speaking or telling a customary hello and we exclaim that we are on ‘social’ media. I guess it can not get any more ‘unsocial’ than that, failing to acknowledge the people whom we meet in our lives.
I decide to forgive myself (and others if I have to) about being complacent on wishing people who are tagged with a green button telling that they are available online. Then I revisit the friends list to evaluate if these friends have been in touch with me via ‘likes’, ‘comments’ or ‘shares’. While many pass the test because of the ‘like’ button, a few fail that one as well. A certain proportion of people in the list do not talk on chat boxes, do not actually acknowledge with a simple ‘like’ maybe even once a year and they still adorn our friend lists. Forgive those who are not the users, who only own an account, but I know of people who are online 24/7 and still do bare minimum to maintain the social courtesy, thereby fuelling fodder to the whole system being an unsocial media.
I suddenly come across people on twitter who amass thousands of followers, not that they would have done any thing to command the same. Their ways are impeccable, they know how to ‘follow’ people and quickly ‘unfollow’ once they get a follow back thereby building a formidable spectrum of followers. It is easy to become a twitter celebrity and the aftermath of it is even more sordid, the person starts to believe he or she is a leader of sorts, amassing these so-called followers who are themselves not even distantly aware of the agenda of the people whom they follow.
I am in the process of rapidly exploring the ways of as to how I can keep the harm to a minimum if and when I leave social media for good. If it were about the people whom I have known or the people who interact with me, I would have kept the tie with the social media intact. However, with the evidence suggesting just the contrary, I feel giving a thought about unfriending the unsocial social media is a thought that may have passed across the minds of many, if not all.
Writing with a purpose 