“Nobody texts me,” my younger brother of 14 said, agitated (or I felt he was) as he moved his fingers on his tablet and uninstalled WhatsApp to make way for his new game. I looked at him awestruck. That was a huge step to take, especially in this generation where WhatsApp rules over so many humans. With over a billion downloads in Play Store, WhatsApp nearly covers a seventh of the world’s population. People post almost everything over hundreds of social networking sites headed by Facebook. The world we are living in is straight out of a dystopian novel, and this has not been written by George Orwell but by our very own Mark Zuckerberg.
Nowadays it would appear that your online status is more important than money in the wallet. Gone are the days when slaying in front of your ex-girlfriend or boyfriend with a new one was bold; now you just SnapPost it by hashtagging. Another trend that has taken over the network like a storm is meme-making. More than making them, tagging your friends to it is important. From my experience I can say waking up and seeing not being tagged hurts a lot.
Somewhere inside I felt uncomfortable with my brother’s unsociable life: his having uninstalled that app, it will affect him. This is the age of online socialising. Your status is defined by the number of your online friends. Doesn’t being shut out make him look dumb in front of his schoolmates? It’s not as if he didn't have an account, he made it on Facebook with the wrong age and sent friend requests to almost everyone he found, but what must have hit him is the fact that people didn't respond to him. This is a delicate age for all this.
Everybody wants to be famous online. They want to have followers and become an insta-celeb or a social media influencer. This unresponsive attitude by people must have hit him.
In the evening I was at the house of my best friend, a civil services aspirant. While talking about why he stopped using Facebook, he said the same thing: that nobody texts him. In addition, he said people seem to have become idle. They always talk of girls and are pretentious.
After making these two powerful comments he took a step back by saying, “Maybe I don’t fit into this world.”
I pondered over this while going back home and couldn't reach any conclusion because his two points were really strong, but his other point cut. People love to post gym pictures more than they work out. They want a closed place to love but the whole social network to shout and boast about it. Another thing that needs to be taken care of is this: people are highly volatile these days on the network. I won’t blame it on the current government but people these days ignite too easily but none of them ever ignite and unite. They just stand up to fight and divide.
Thank god, Facebook doesn't have real-time weapons. Beyond all the faking there is beauty too that people connect with. For me I found my love over here.
With all this my mind wandered back to my brother who had gone to play basketball and I was sitting with the network logged in. Mom yelled over me. Ahha, seems I should log out too.
rudralittle@gmail.com
