Hope you 'LIKE' this!

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Coming back to my blog after a huge gap. I have been busy shooting my documentary ('Budhan Diaries') , have been working on a play for sometime ('Naam-enclature'), and then did some travelling too.


Feels nice to be back on this space. Over the last few months, the computer has taken another meaning, or should I say, the internet has acquired another meaning.


Every evening, I go back to my hostel room. After freshening up, I sit down on my PC. I switch it on, connect the internet, and the first address which I type is 'facebook.com'! This happens everyday like a default setting. Seriously it does!

After logging on to my account, i check the number of notifications I have. More the number, happier I am. It can be as random as your friend's friend liking your 100 year old picture, or some-sort of a stranger tagging you in a picture in which you are not even properly visible, but ya, it works!

And I am sure this is just not my story. Many people of my age group feel the same about similar things. This is not an addiction, as addictions can be fought with and you can get rid of them. This is a HABBIT, which you can't give away so easily. There have been debates and discussions that this is bad. But I am not sure if it is actually that bad.

A couple of weeks ago, our batch at NID decided to show our films to the whole NID community. We thought of putting up posters around the campus, but one of us made a 'page' on facebook about our event.
We uploaded posters made by friends and we got a great response. All friends and friends of friends or may be friends of friends of friends could see our film posters and they got to know about the event. People not even living in NID or Ahmedabad got to know about the event and were interested in it. This truly is the power of social networking.

The screening was successful with a jam-packed auditorium.

Then we were performing a play and in a seriies of hasty decisions on 9th Feb, we decided to do the play on 10th Feb...just on the next day.
Again, facebook came to our rescue. Just in 24 hours, we had posted so many status messages and posters, that the amphitheater during the play was full.

In a culture where word-of-mouth is the best mode of communication, things like facebook are a big boon. From uploading your best friend's picture for the world, to publically 'liking' random things, it gives every aspect of freedom which one wants.

But there's just one problem. I think this is the right stage to stop ourselves...may be to step back and think. When it started, facebook was a part of the world, but now the world is a part of facebook. That's scary.

If i say that your profile picture is nice, you won't believe me unless and until I 'comment' on your pic. Our walls on facebook have started to represent what we are. Unfortunately, we have started believing too much on 'walls' which don't even exist; on 'likes' which are not meant to be likes. They can be just any emotion. That's dangerous.

I know who are friends with me on facebook, but don't even smile at me when we meet personally. That's what 'walls' do to us. You can hide behind them and still operate.

Sometimes we don't even mean what we click or post. Recently I posted something on these lines "With Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, a whole generation of Indian classical music passes away."

It got 24 likes! I know they didn't mean it, but by 'liking' it, they made meanings unconcsiously. I know most of them meant 'RIP', but I don't know how to put it. There was something wrong when I saw 24 likes on the news of Pt. Joshi's death!

We're all in the same boat and we 'like' it.
There's so much of facebook in us these days that sometimes even in real life, we start searching for the 'like' button. I have heard people saying now they can't live without social networking.

I still don't know how much of it is wrong or how much is wrong. But to solve it I went back to my best friends- THE CROWS.

Going back to my My-crow thinking-

'All crows know each other, they know about all the surrounding communities of birds, they have events; they all communicate, they all comment. They all like or dislike each other...They do all this without being on Facebook!'


©K. Harish Singh 2011







Comments

Mira said…
this was typically k.harish. my favorite line was "That's what 'walls' do to us. You can hide behind them and still operate." loved it completely!
February 11, 2011 at 2:24 AM
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