Your next post on social media may carry a hefty price
Let the curtains be raised, characters take the position and “ACTION”.
Prologue: A nice cozy house in an equally cozy city, no inhabitants inside the house, but wait someone’s in the kitchen!! That is no denizen of this house but turns out he is a robber. He has comfortably stationed himself in the house from the past three days, cooking whatever is available, watching the TV and even sleeping there.
He then starts divesting the house of its things. No impartiality there, he pilfers of everything from kitchen, packs up TV, computers and of course the hidden valuables and takes off for good.
What if I said that this is a real story!! Does a slight chill run down the marrows?
Yes, this incident happened in real!! Cut a long story short, the thief who was at large for few days was finally apprehended and brought to justice. Everyone was puzzled by the peculiar way this thief robbed the house, by being domiciled inside the house for a good three days and then doing off with the things.
Here’ the thief’s reply. He said he knew that the lady owner of the house would be away with her friends on a trip for three days. How asked the perplexed inspector.
“I saw her post on facebook about her trip and her regular updates with selfies of her having a good time with friends was a double assurance that I still had a lot of time on my hands!!”
Perils of too much social media addiction?
That may be one of the offshoots, a serious one in that, but let’s view the saga of the social media epidemic with a special lens called “common sense”. This piece is about not only how your next post may land you in trouble (although it can like the story above), but how social media addiction can affect us.
Let’s face it. We are in an era where we adjudge people we know personally (and those whom we don’t) by the social media updates that they post.
Whether it is out of peer pressure, or hiding our complexes, or a convenient cover-up for our not so eventful life, we want the world to see that we are living in utopia!! We want to glorify by personifying ourselves with the obverse facets of life enriched with a topping of vividness to depict an aggrandizing face of us on the cyber world; that we are the most blessed ones, are we not? Isn’t the world getting envious?
Ah! If life was really as good as we post it on Facebook!!
The whole damn world seems to take a bow at this. Everything is becoming so superficial!! It seems like a book is very instantaneously judged by its cover without even trying to understand what core values the book carries. Talk of values!!
Inadvertently, the flip side is that our purpose in whatever we do becomes shallower!! All we need is quick recognition, our posts to become viral, more people becoming our followers!! Seem like the very purpose of doing anything now is targeted towards improving our online profile than what the original purpose was meant to do.
There was a time when blessed souls walked this very earth and people followed these persons for the values that these erudite pedagogues bestowed to the public!!
The younger generation especially the teenagers easily falls prey to these vicious tentacles of the digital world. With early exposure to social media, the younger generation is so much influenced that their life is getting afflicted by the cyber epidemic. The danger is that the younger generation might lose the capability in discerning life’s core values. They may not be able to think and live beyond the digital media ballpark. They are putting there lives in jeopardy going to extremes to please their virtual followers. Definitely not a conducive environment for the future generation. Suicidal deaths due to social media, teenagers losing their lives in freak accidents for that one coveted photo etc are on the rife.
Ok, let’s unearth the demons from the online underworld!!
Why do we paint a rosy picture of ourselves on social media?
Let’s take some help from the internet itself 😊.
This site very tersely puts why not to try impressing the wrong people (social media friends) and instead impress people that matter (our real family and friends) and strive to gain actual likes from people who matter to us.
I came across this URL which puts it very bluntly, straight on the face.
Excerpt from this:
So the next time you’re driven to jealousy by a Facebook friend’s humblebragging about his or her awesome life, don’t forget: They’re probably embellishing it for social media, even if it’s unconsciously.
Ultimately, Facebook is a narcissistic playground where the best, the funniest, the most charming aspects of our lives are publicized and the shitty stuff, the boring stuff, the beige that is most of our daily grind almost never gets posted. All those walls are edited at some level and that makes them, at best, a deformed mirror image of real life or, at worst, nothing more than a fictional movie of how we want people to see us.
Can’t put better than this. By just glorifying our awesome life on electronic media, we are not being true to ourselves. We are not living for ourselves, but just for some “likes” and “comments” from people whom we barely know.
To conclude, is it really worth feigning our lives just to gain some attention from people who really didn’t matter that much in our lives? Personally, I would strive to get claps and gain followers on medium than on other social media networking sites. The claps and followers on medium mean our hard work is appreciated and that is a soul-filling experience than getting likes and followers on other social media networks from our shallow posts.
