It was just another day on Twitter. The timeline was the usual wasteland of sensationalist news stories, pithy observations, and hastily cracked jokes. (I’m being facetious: I think I have an excellent and balanced timeline, but that’s another column for another week.)
And then something that happens every now and then happened: someone I used to follow and speak with regularly, exclusively virtually, appeared on my timeline via a screenshot shared by someone I follow. It felt like that vague, gentle back-flip your stomach does when you see a person you used to be friends with or at least well-acquainted with and regard them as familiar strangers.
In reality, you might be burdened with the excruciating prospect of having to avoid eye contact or awkwardly acknowledging each other’s presence. Online, you have a variety of options. Twitter, for instance, has a ‘mute’ feature that allows you to block a user from your timeline without them ever coming to know — it’s the virtual equivalent of avoiding someone socially in the craftiest manner possible, aided perhaps by fairly advanced mathematics. It does more for friendships than honesty (being facetious again — or am I?) and stabilises your mental health to a fair degree.
Those who don’t spend a lot of time on social media — we must keep reminding ourselves there are plenty of them out there — may find it strange that two people can be friends just over the Internet. Aristotle, after all, defined friendship as “a single soul dwelling in two bodies” and some of our social media posts may, for some people, reveal more than real-life interactions. The contents of our ‘souls’ could be potentially all over our social media profiles, making it easier to identify like-minded, promising candidates for friends.
Whether you extend your embargo upon someone’s online existence to boring-but-with-infinitely-better-graphics real life is a matter of one’s own discretion, I’ve learned. You could decide to unfollow or mute someone and still meet them socially to varying degrees. People could be the best of friends in real life but communicate or even follow each other on social media.
At any given point of time, for example, I have a number of people muted on Twitter and/or unfollowed on Facebook. Some of them are people I actually like very much and may even be close friends with. Sometimes you don’t like people’s online identities — they may be more vain than you’re used to, or more flippant than you’ve ever heard. There could be a number of reasons — being online, after all, affects your brain the same way alcohol and hard drugs do.
It may be argued that avoiding the mental fatigue that comes with having to deal with the disagreeable or unlikeable tendencies of a friend is worth the risk of the friend finding out that you’re trying to avoid them. Like most things, if this holds true in real life, it should hold true online, too. The advantage the latter has is that all the potentially advanced maths to help them avoid that fatigue has already been worked out.
Suprateek Chatterjee is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist who writes on film, music and popular culture, and tweets @SupraMario
