Checked out of privacy!

Alas! The world has woken up to the importance of privacy and suddenly it is the most sanctified. Last year we celebrated the 13^th 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.