I’ve finally figured out how social media works, and by extension the meaning of life. It goes something like this. You have just eaten a juicy mango, and naturally, like all who eat juicy mangoes, you want to share the experience with the world.
So you tweet: “I’ve just eaten a mango and it is so juicy. Makes me happy to be alive.”
Let’s look at five responses to this.
The first response is: “What makes you so special? Who do you think you are? What childhood traumas are you trying to forget? Could you eat juicy mangoes under the previous government?
The second one goes: “I hate you, you apple-denier. Why the mango when apples are so much juicier and easier to chomp down on. You should go live in Pakistan, you xxxx (never heard this word before)”
And the third: “Apologise for your discriminatory tweet, you mangowalla. The implication that you need to be alive to be happy discriminates against the dead.”
The fourth: “Do you know there are children in Siberia who have never seen an apple? Are you proud of yourself now?”
And finally, the fifth: “I hate Stephen King. Can you recommend another writer?”
I have no idea where that last response came from, or why, or indeed if there is a secret message there.
The question that asks itself is, why do people bother to a) get on social media and b) respond to other social media freaks? Loneliness, the anonymity of the unsigned message, desire to insult people because your boss shouted at you, ego, lack of ego, opportunity to use cuss words in public have all been underlined by psychologists as reasons for both a) and b).
Social media has made the word “oversharing” popular both as a concept and a psychological problem. In the example quoted above, why should the world care if you ate a juicy mango or not? But if you imagine nobody gives a hoot, you only have to read the responses. People give a hoot, and the hoots inspire other hoots, and before you know it, the authorities have imposed a mango tax, made juicy mangoes illegal and writing about them a criminal offence.
Oversharing begets oversharing. My mango-eating gets someone else thinking, “why should he write about eating mangoes? I will write about cleaning my shoes.” And so it goes. Our daily lives are filled with packets of useless information delivered at a pace and with a lack of passion that only the truly apathetic can achieve. My mango interests you only in so much as it sets you off on your shoe story.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you don’t tell us about mango eating, do you exist at all? As the philosopher Descartes nearly said, I tweet, therefore I am. Social media validates existence. Sartre was wrong. Existence precedes essence, he said, when it is the other way around.
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
