Facebook: The Life We Don’t Practice

Face this. Facebook is like an interactive mirror – you want it to reflect a lie that you want other people  to believe. You want this mirror to let others see the life you really don’t live in reality.

Facebook is a world of farce, where we keep posting things that in reality we hardly subscribe to. Call it Pleasebook – the world where we want to please others, and live a life of superficial bliss.

In Facebook, we are both lonely and social. We feel connected to a world which is in fact disconnected from reality.

Imagine a situation: you have got ten guests in your home and they are all spread in different rooms. They include your schoolmates, college friends, former colleagues and one or two relatives also. You had gone out and as soon as you enter your home, you are told about their presence.

What will you do? Obviously you would go and talk to everyone of them. You will be very happy to see them.

Every time  you log into Facebook, at your bottom left corner you will see many people from your friends list being online in the chat list. How many of you actually chat with them – who include all those people I mentioned above? Even if we chat with somebody, it would be a person with whom you are already in regular contact may be through cellphone, or it might be your girlfriend/ boyfriend, but in most cases it won’t be your old classmate, or a distant relative whom you had met many many years ago!

You know that they are there, but for some strange reasons you don’t ping them, not often at least.

Every time we upload our picture, it will be the best among hundreds of snaps from album in our system. Of course we want to put best ‘face’ out there, but why not other snaps where we don’t look good?

Actually we want people to ‘like’ the snap, if possible comment pleasantly on it.

We keep looking at top left corner to see if there is any tiny red pop-ups with white numbers on them, may be in double digits!

We put a status message that doesn’t have anything to do with our life. If at all we write something from our life, it will be philosophical.

May be we want people to know that we are happy, sad, having fun, and going to shoot someone; but for whom does we put all those ‘status updates’? For all the 500+ friends in the list? for close friends who already know more about you?

Or just you want a vent to show your alter ego to the virtual world that only emotes through ‘likes’ and ‘shares’?

Facebook is about pretension and also hypocrisy.  Some people ‘share’ photos that talk about nationalism, women empowerment, and social issues – it is a good thing. But, a person who likes a photo hailing woman, also shares another photo where is shown as dumb, boyfriend ditching bitch.

We are more interested in what others do also. Facebook is the best platform to peek deep into lives of other people. We also form part of those ‘other’ people and our life story is also depicted on timeline and read by ‘others’.

In reality we don’t talk about going to pub, or a rave party with not so close friends. In Facebook it is free for all.

One thing that is missing in Facebook is intelligent conversation. If we can share snippets of our lives that go public, we hardly indulge in debating things that are more important for our lives and society.

Nobody read full article whose link is on your wall. By the time you visit the site and read first paragraph, you are tempted to go back to check new notifications. That ends the story, because you visit new link, and another link.

It is a lonely world out there howsoever connected you are with hundreds of ‘friends’. When on web, we forget real people living within four walls of our home.

Socializing on internet actually makes you ‘desocialize’ with real people in your life.

Every time we post something, comment on somebody’s status, or ‘like’ an update – we are deeply drawn into the vortex of network which will be difficult for us to extricate from it in future.

If I put link to this article on Facebook, hardly anyone will read it. Not that they are not interested in it, just they don’t have time and patience for it.

There are of course benefits of using sites like Facebook, but most of us are not interested in those ‘benefits’ – in fact we use it for vanity reasons, not as an utility to enhance productivity at work, or in life.

Most of us know that Facebook is the famous app that is used by millions to kill their productivity.

Thing is we don’t use it  to remain in contact with old friends – the major objective; but we use it to tell the world who we are not, and what we don’t do.

At what cost?

I don’t know.Facebook had $ 3.5 billion revenues in 2011 – mind-blowing figure considering social costs involved.