Facebook World

I joined, the most hyped social network, Facebook, almost after I passed out from my engineering in 2009. Before that, I was on Orkut. Since Orkut was losing its fame with the rise of Facebook & every single person I knew was migrating from Orkut to Facebook, I too followed the herd. I tried using Facebook for few months & got to know the fakeness it carries and deleted my account in about just 6 months.

I am that kind of a person, who dwells in social presence online but I choose to quit Facebook.  Most of my friends, relatives, collgeues often ask about my reason of quitting Facebook & I somehow always try to skip answering the question. To be honest, I too don’t know the exact reason. I just felt something is not right and Facebook is making me sick but no idea, how.

Even to this day, I’m totally unclear of “exact” reasons of quitting/disliking the Facebook as my thoughts are still absurd and haven’t taken proper form to give an exact answer but I thought, let’s give a try and point out few “findings” which I keep thinking in my head about “The Facebook” and its virtual world.

According to me, in the Facebook world that we live in, friends are available as ‘requests’ and friendships are often ‘confirmed’. I feel, louder the drum beating and attention seeking symptoms on Facebook, higher the helplessness of the individual. In the Facebook world, it’s all about messaging, the ping, the poke and the post and forget whatever happened to so called, face-to-face communication. I feel, Facebook is a dangerous place when not navigated wisely. It is easy to get brain-washed. It is all about technology & virtual presence where there is no empathy or warmth to be found. Without the real life’s awkward pauses and often embarrassing face-to-face interactions, the Facebook virtual world creates a bubble of unreal perfection. Once an individual spends enough time over here and later when posed with real life challenges like pain, loss, heart break, insecurity & anger, minds of Facebook user will be ill-equipped to deal with it. All I want to say over here is, in a Facebook world, the line between reality and fiction gets blurred. It is easy for individual to mix up virtual world with real one.

At last what I want to say is, I am not totally against social networking or Facebook in general but I am afraid and certainly don’t believe in Facebook the way it is used by all of us. After all, the idea of Facebook is that, people are more interested in knowing what happens in others life than theirs!