Let me look at the kind of things I do on Facebook. To begin with, I post a lot of pictures of the sky because the sky, according to me, is the most beautiful thing about earth. I often point my phone camera at patches that best describe the mood of the day and share the pictures to let my friends know that my eyes have spotted something spectacular in the mundane.
I also upload pictures of places I travel to. That’s my way of taking friends along to those locations, though occasionally the idea is also to show off. I also routinely share online links to my writings and links about my books — if I don’t promote my work, who will? And occasionally I write the odd status message.
Does all this make me a Facebook addict? The answer is a feeble yes — as well as a pronounced no.
Yes, because if there was no Facebook, I would have composed poems about the sky instead of clicking the clouds; I would have written travelogues about places I visit instead of posting pictures from there; I would have expanded stray thoughts into 1000-word blog posts instead of limiting them into one- or two-line status messages. The frequent use of Facebook to assert my existence has already narrowed the hose-pipe that irrigates my creative cells — a clear case of an addiction taking its toll.
And now: why I am not an addict. To begin with, I never post selfies. I hardly scroll through my news feed and confine myself to clicking on notifications related to my posts. The number of ‘likes’ — or the lack of them — doesn’t affect my mood. Most importantly, I do not engage myself with friends on Facebook: I know it is rude but I rarely reply to comments on my posts, for if I begin to do so regularly, I would only be acknowledging my parallel existence as an online entity. I am flesh-and-blood, who may have an additional online identity, but who is certainly not an online entity.
When online identity and online entity sound one and the same to you, you are an addict: you may spend hours with a friend in a café but you still don’t feel connected enough until you get back home and exchange messages with the friend over Facebook or WhatsApp — a case of online presence validating offline existence.
There was a time when you befriended total strangers in various chatrooms, and only later, if logistics permitted, met them in person over coffee or dinner. I have half-a-dozen good friends whom I first met many years ago, online, as nameless, faceless entities, who would not reveal much about themselves back then. The unravelling happened over time and the online encounters eventually turned into offline associations.
Today, as soon as we shake hands with a person in real life, we ‘add’ the person on Facebook in order to establish an online association: the physical handshake is of no value unless followed up by a Facebook friendship. Nothing wrong in that, but when you start finding symbolic hugs more comforting than real hugs, you are an addict.
Not to worry. Help is on its way. Small-town India is replete with ‘doctors’ who claim to have the cure for almost every disease afflicting mankind: from piles to alcoholism to erectile dysfunction. These ‘doctors’ are now including ‘Facebook and WhatsApp addiction’ in the list of diseases they treat. I know this because I recently saw the picture of a pamphlet printed by one such ‘doctor’. And where did I see the picture? Facebook, of course.
