Sunday, March 25, 2012

What have we become!!!


The advent of social networking sites has made most of us sitting ducks in the real world. But, in the virtual world, each of us are active online, tweeting/facebooking about our daily chores, interests, posting pictures of a recent party we attended, posting pictures to ask friends whether the 'look' suits us, what we are reading and letting the world know what we are upto at every second in our life. SNSes have penetrated into our lives to a point where we are unable to stop it. The urge to constantly update about your activities has become common.

And, then, we have friends who wait for us to update our facebook/ twitter statuses and 'like' them just for the heck of it. If people like your pictures, you are seen as someone Mr/Ms Perfect. And, then we start judging people by looking at their pictures on Facebook. Under this category, there are yahoos who send friend requests to beautiful/attractive/pretty/good-looking girls and ask all sorts of weird questions like "wana do frndship with me/can we be friends/I want to talk to you/Hey, How are you?" And, there are some who POKE these girls. These poker faces who try to strike a conversation with the girl, just by reading her profile information. This is an attempt to act intelligent or act like he knows the subject she is dealing with or the college she belongs to or pretend to know people from her college or workplace. What they don't understand is that they are making a fool out of themselves and the girl is just being nice to them.

And, then there are girls who are even crazier and have a 'Holier than thou' feeling. they think the whole world is smitten by their pictures uploaded online. For them, their looks matter the most in life and impressing a guy is like the biggest achievement in their lives. They have (girl) friends who are exactly like them and then bitch about those same friends on their back to others. And among these, if a guy approaches a girl for something, say help or a favour, the friends (who cannot think straight) begin linking up this friend to the poor guy who is least interested in any of those schmucks.

Even marriages happen on Facebook nowadays. People put up all sorts of pictures of their partners, wanting the whole world to know that they are "happily" married, though 'happily' is very questionable in this case. And then. there are fights on Facebook, twitter.

And then there are SNS fanatics, who think their life is being fucked up big time, they have all the problems in the world and vent it out on social networking sites. In fact, they are the most depressing people on Earth. They vent out their anger on the government, they pick on everyone around them, they don't like their workplace and they crib 24X7. All this on a social networking site and once a person points a finger at them. These SNS fanatics indulge in verbal abuse online, forget their limits, invade one's privacy and scorn them in such a way that the poor person who posted a link/ status on the SNS regrets it. Mind you, in the process, this fanatic thinks he is on top of the world and rules it, when, on the other side, his life is fucked up big time and he cannot get out of virtual world which he assumes as his real world.  

While these are some examples of what we are becoming because of the social networking sites, we have forgotten where to draw the line between our personal and virtual lives. Virtual behaviour also matters. It matters because you are under constant public scrutiny and therefore, have to watch what you reveal/say.

       

3 comments:

Harnad said...

Social Networking guru
Nice post!

Prashanth said...

Good (analytical) writeup. Enjoyed every bit of it while reading :o)

Your words 'draw the line between our personal and virtual lives' should be guidelines for many..

Mahafreed Irani said...

Interesting points. I think I am a SNS fanatic. :p