We are almost addicted to it; when I say we – I mean a huge percentage of our total computer literate population. There are people who taught themselves to use PC just with one agenda in mind, “to be on some interesting social networking site”. It is spreading fast; kids, young ones and even old ones are getting hooked to it at an exceptional rate!
Something which is so much controlling our day to day life needs to be discussed and that’s why I am talking to you. Now I will talk about what do I feel about it; may be when I explain this, you find a correlation between what all me and you go through.
In short, it gives me a feeling as if I am in my sitting room attending guests the whole day and all night.
Well, socializing is a wonderful stress reliever; it’s an immense source of emotional strength. It raises the level of self-prestige also. Overall if one enjoys socializing, he or she just loves to jump into it. Then what is wrong with socializing??? Well it brings lots of other things.
A primary aspect is show-off; when we meet with a purpose of socializing, the agenda is to sell ourselves and the social meeting is just a vehicle used for that purpose. It’s quite different from a regular meeting; it’s quite different from a meeting with a desire to exchange two words. Million dollar question here is what is wrong with show-off; after all it’s all about selling yourself. Well again, this selling puts us on the race track and the stress starts increasing slowly and the worst part is you don’t even get to know about this stress building up in your subconscious mind. What I said – it builds-up stress? Wow, just in the beginning of this discussion I said socializing is a stress reliever. See how a strong strength turned into weakness. This is called complication in simple terms.
I feel we also start living in a virtual world while interacting through these virtual sites. When people start posting only about the new vehicle, only about the vacations, only about the official trips to great locations, only about the goody-goody moments with the spouse, only about how much quality time they have given to their kids – believe me it all becomes too sugary and diabetic. Life is a combo of sweet and sour and my profile should reflect my life; isn’t it? One feature that I would love to have if life becomes virtual – is “Undo”. But no, it’s not yet virtual. It has to be real; it cannot be completely virtual.
Another angle that it adds to several other things in life is negligence. Imagine if you have a house full of guests, whole day long and even during nights; when will you study or cook or work my dear and when will you help kids to do homework. Visitor timings are always followed with an idea of ensuring basic discipline to be in place.
It sometimes totally defeats the definition of the word friends. In my real life I find it so difficult to count number of friends that I have… one very dear that comes to mind instantly has shifted miles apart across the continents. Yes, I am thankful to Facebook for bridging that gap. But what really surprises me is the long list of friends in anybody’s profile. Often the friends listed here are not even acquaintances; strange! So many of them who have never seen each other; who have always disliked each other; who are ex-girlfriend or boyfriend, or may be prospective …. And it’s just interesting.
Another quite interesting experience I have had on FB is about a person’s real nature and person’s virtual behaviour. Those who are not willing to offer you a cup of tea, if accidently ever you land-up at their place, are amazingly warm on the net. Those who have been doing all sorts of manipulations are often seen as great advisors and preachers on the net.
This is how I feel and like any other tool this media also can be utilized in various ways. How constructively and beautifully we use it is left on us by its creators. After all we are human and we love to do things differently! Know something - God is biased; he has the best chess board laid for himself and he silently watches each and every move we - the emotional people - take on his earth. But humans and their behaviour are interesting to God even!!!