Open Facebook. Check if anybody has liked the status message I had set the last time. Sigh. No one. What’s wrong everyone’s sense of humour? Or is it something with me? Shrug. Scroll down.
Anshat is now friends with 6 more people. He already has more friends than the number of tigers in India.
Somebody has uploaded a pic. Jain Aashish likes it.
Somebody has put a status message. An obligatory comment by Amol.
Sriram K and 5 other people changed their profile pic.
The lyrics of some song by Shruti (and her later complaining that no one likes or comments on her updates – which to be frank, is worrying for a girl).
Shantanu comments about Manchester United. Sangit tries to draw Patel into the conversation. ‘Well left’ by Patel.
Somebody has put a good status message or posted a link on Sachin. Like it immediately. Ahh, somebody has something nasty to say about the legend. Give it back to him. I can’t be a neutral here. Ayn Rand had said there can only be a white or a black, all shades of grey are evil.
A cool status message by someone. Click on ‘like’ asap. Scroll further down. The same message by someone else. Ahh, should I now unlike the first one? A real-life ethical dilemma, this.
Some people seriously feel for a cause and have chosen to express their anger - using bad spelling or punctuation.
Some people commenting on corruption and India’s withering democracy, while others taking democracy to a whole new level by voting for (answering) everything, from their favourite handwash to the next president of the United States.
Someone randomly decides to celebrate <insert relation here>’s week, to announce that their <copy-paste the same relation> are the best. Some people spreading <enter disease here> awareness and have devoted their status to the patients for an hour.
Some people are curious as to what a father did to his daughter. Some want to know how Osama was dead, while others just want a peep into the future to see how they’ll look at old age. Some people want to untag themselves from videos. I wonder if they will fall for this.
Close tab.
Facebook is screwed up. It is addictive. You can waste any amount of time on it. There is an urge to upload every pic, share every link you visit, or update with every thought you have. People have broken up because of facebook; people have broken up on facebook. It makes everything else appear so trivial. You rely on facebook to keep in touch with close friends; you use it to stalk someone. WTF Facebook.
Facebook is good. It helps me be in touch with so many people I would have otherwise lost touch with. It keeps me aware of things happening in their lives. It has kept me company on many a nights when I had nothing better to do. I have visited many restaurants, read many books, seen many movies only because of facebook. Facebook FTW.
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Man is a social animal
“A person who can bring the spirit of laughter into a room is indeed blessed.” No I’m not going to tread any philosophical paths here. This is my ‘Today’s Fortune’ according to Orkut. I am not fortunate enough or blessed enough to understand what their interpretation of fortune is, but I can do my best to laugh at them, and at what they’ve turned us into.
Welcome to the era of social networking. Initially, conceived as a medium for keeping in contact with our second tier of friends, social networking sites have permeated our lives in a big way. Back in college, Orkut was what kept everyone busy. I still remember a profile name which said “Amol Patil : Before Orkut, its hard to remember what I did in my internet time”. Don’t quite remember who had posted it though [:D]. Anyways, we added everyone we remotely knew, or thought we knew, or even wanted to know, in our friends list. We communicated with each other through scraps sitting in the same lab or in adjoining rooms, in a bid to boast our scrap counts. Some self-sufficient people posted in their own scrapbooks. We congratulated each other on our 100th or 1000t0h scraps. We requested each other to write testimonials about us.
And then there were stories wherein lost lovers found each other thanks to this God-sent site (this phenomenon has probably come a full circle, with people now using this tool to announce to their lovers how hurt they are, or that they are beyond them). Anyways how is one supposed to even find the other when all their profile name says is “Off Orkut for 21 days”.
What goes up comes down. The popularity of Orkut is on the wane, but we have a new messiah in the form of Facebook. You know something is wrong when you go out for dinner with friends and all that people are concerned with is, clicking snaps. No one cares about the food or even in discussing Dravid’s return to Team
Go to Facebook’s Airtel page, and you will find people bitching about their services. The catch here is you need to be a fan of the page to post a comment.
And I won’t skip the part where people spam other’s walls with their status messages, mostly copied from here and there. I accede that the person most guilty of that is someone who is closest to my heart (which can theoretically be only me). But nothing like ending your day with some laughter, and Facebook provided me some very recently when one of the status messages said “Down with fever” and below it there was a line which said “2 people like this”. Boy, it is about time we got a life.
Social networking is here to stay. When people are bored with Facebook, there will be some other knight in shining armor (hopefully provided by Yahoo!). As Chandler Bing would have probably said “Could man BE any more social!”
All said and done, if you are not on my friend’s list, please add me on Orkut and Facebook [:P]. And regarding the copied status messages:
"Why should I give my Readers bad lines of my own when good ones of other People's are so plenty?"
- Benjamin Franklin
PS1 – After my last blog, some of the people asked me the relevance of the title. For the people who are still ignorant or people who never bothered to think about it, no I have not been influenced by Guddu of Kaminey (Charlie would have called me Rahul Faraf), but rah rah has a meaning as well.
PS2 - I purposely did not mention about people who request others to comment on, or to follow their blog posts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)