I started out with a simple question, ‘What is your view on facebook? is it a good thing or a bad?’ and that termed out this entire post. Not that this entire post tends to just answer the above question, but it does attempt to go deep into the wounds caused by social networking, and facebook in common. Well, it would be pretty naïve to jump to a conclusion this early, nevertheless it would be my bad if you don’t feel so after having read this. I got many answers to the questions, some termed a social networking site to be a social networking site, and that it can’t be tagged good or bad; the answer was reasonable enough, but not to the point.
However, if we travel deep into the question to help answer it, we might well get entangled with the many viewpoints of the different walks of life. The elderly may say, ‘the young ones gotta go out to the streets and play’, the office bosses may say, ‘make those fingers work godspeed, I want the assignment submitted on my desk in five minutes!’, the ones who still wanna illogically contradict may say, ‘social networking is social networking, there is nothing good or bad,’ but all these are better said than explained.
Getting to the point, we often notice that people on facebook are all good to us. Everyone! Its like some post-world war agreement signed between two countries; everyone is so good to us, even the worst of our enemies. Bottomline is that we all want to look good in front of the masses, we all fancy diplomacy. But the truth is, well, chuck!
To get deeper into this issue, lets go back to stone age perhaps, where everyone worked hard to build relationships. The primitive men might just laugh at us and call us fools for living two lives (social networking and real), we might just do the vice versa, but the point stays and the question comes back: Is facebook good or bad?
Let’s just put ourselves in a situation; we can’t imagine ourselves without technology though, it wouldn’t be possible for us to go through the renaissance and waste four hundred years doing nothing. Let’s imagine ourselves with the TV, the computers, the internet and all that there is now, except for social networking, okay? So here’s how the drill goes, we wake up every morning, watch some local news as we butter up some toast and take rounds of our room, finding our socks, shoes and hanky in the bargain. We then go out, well dressed, meet Mr. Brown mowing his lawns, say hello and talk about how Mr. Green who lived down the street, managed to fly his family to Rome on a family vacation. Then look into the wrist watch, see the hands ticking a little over 7:45 and bid our pleasantries to walk our own ways. We then somehow manage to check into office after having taken the bus-route to there and take a few modest comments from the manager. We then take a lot of crap all through the day from the work put onto us by the manager and return, fully famished. We then go sit on the sofa and do a little leftover paper work. A friend maybe calls on our phone and calls us over to the local bar to grab a few beers and chat, we oblige. At the end, we retreat on bed, looking at the day, cursing the manager for pressure, the canteen staff for the room-temperature coffees and the warm slushies. But then we smile when we think about the round of talks over beer, the drunken conflict, the drunken fight that could only grow funnier, and so many other things that we can’t even remember of.
Now let’s see how the drill with facebook fares. We get up in the morning, log in to see how many notifications we’ve got overnight:
1. Dhanushri Mehta likes your album: ‘GOA-2010’. (You smile)
2. Shikha Barua (your crush) likes your status: ‘If I could reach up and hold a star for every time you've made me smile, the entire evening sky would be in the palm of my hand’. (You smile and blush)
3. Shikha Barua (your crush again) commented on your status: ‘hmm J’ (Your smile grows up wider and you hold the arms of your chair and grow taller in your seat)
4. Jane Woolchuck (acquanted friend from Green Bay Wisconsin) sent you a request in farmville. (You jump up from the seat with a wider smile and want to do something different, but decide to continue facebooking)
Then at 7:30 you realise that you need to be in office at 8:00. You rush up, gargle your mouth, spray some mint, tuck yourself into an already worn coat and hit the streets. You see Mr. Brown mowing the lawns, but have no time to stop by. You reach office late, get helluva scoldings from the manager for not having completed the leftover work, your day goes terribly bad as the added up paper work from yesterday makes the paperwork today look like its gonna make you write the Mahabharata. The room-temperature coffee and warm slushy worsens the day. You then return home and straightaway attack the pc and log in. You check the notification:
1. Dhanushri Mehta commented on your status ‘you’re mine’: ‘heheh :P’ (You’re motionless)
2. Shikha Barua also commented on your status: ‘WHAT??!’ (You’re frozen, motionless)
3. Jane Woolchuck sent you truffles for your pigs on farmville. (You’re frozen 10 degree celsuis, motionless)
Just then your friend calls you up, you respond and he calls you over to the bar down the street for some beer. You join him and goes good. Then, finally, you are left with yourself on your bed. You are looking back at the day and it finally ends with a smile, thinking about the beer at the bar. But then it all goes away when he remembers of his incomplete paperwork. He rushes to do whatever he can and leaves the rest to all the scoldings he’s again gonna get.
We’ll this is just an assumption, not reality. It might be annoying as well, but I couldn’t see a better way of explaining my point. Why go do something so often when we are better off without it? Why complicate our lives so much when we can live our lives much simpler and yet enjoy?
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