Alas! The world
has woken up to the importance of privacy and suddenly it is the most sanctified.
Last year we celebrated the 13th birthday of the social media
platform facebook and there was so much zeal over the network turning a teen. With
the teen years, come the tantrums and that’s exactly what we are seeing today.
They are
suddenly finding themselves out of favor with the majority and public in
general are accusing it of sharing their data. Sadly the root cause does not
lie with Facebook alone; we the people too have a certain share in the mess we
find ourselves in.
Facebook
opened up a culture that replaced the conservative closeted diary entry habits
with the writings on the wall. The everyday life happenings were graffiti. Our neighbors
who had never rung our door bell in ages were suddenly poking us to take a look
at their holiday pictures from their La La land. We were in turn poked by our
wives to take out a loan to counter the neighbor’s poke! The parallel rapid developments
in data speed infrastructure & the exponential advancement of smart phones
features further fueled man’s voyeuristic pursuits.
Then came
about the check in culture, even if one waits at the car park of a 5 Star
Hotel to pick up a rich cousin one could
‘check-in’ to the 5 Star hotel much to the envy of friends far away. Every third
person became a food photographer and some dabbled in writing and published it
to the world like yours truly. 50 year olds behaved like adolescents who had a
new toy in their hands. The world went berserk stoked by the human greed for
attention. It was a mass hysteria of Mirror! Mirror! On the wall, who is the
most famous of them all? Mark just facilitated a platform, we the eco-system created
a behemoth out of it and now we cry foul.
We kept shouting
out to the world our joys, sorrows, emotions in our pursuit of virtual ‘likes’ sympathies
and shoulders. We did this by writing on our walls and on the walls of others
little did we realize the literal meaning of the ‘writing on the wall’ which
simply meant a premonition, portent, or
clear indication,
especially of
failure or disaster:
Unfortunately
like all vices adopted by humanity we went overboard with this one too and
sadly social media had words like addiction and rehab soon associated with
it. The days are not far when we could see statutory warning on the ill effects
of Social Media and asking us to use them more responsibly.
PS: Most of
you might read this blog via my Facebook page and the writer is not responsible
for the profiling you may be subjected to, as a result of reading this.
