This scribe is not a member of that tribe which believes in holding the cards too close to the chest, so that others are kept guessing. Experience has taught that some such cards have deadly, serrated edges they nick you painfully and I am so averse to seeing blood, especially my own. My dear wife revels in ticking me off periodically for going over the top with an exaggerated play of openness and painting myself into some notoriously uncomfortable corners with unerring regularity! What? No, sorry - historians have failed abysmally in their duty to
quench the curiosity of readers, by not recording that periodicity of
such rebukes. True to this track record, ascribed by my dear wife to a serious `genetic disorder' (she contemptuously dismissed my bleating plea to use `character flaw' instead - it sounded better, nothing else - because she opined the latter imparted more dignity than deserved, to the personality and issue at hand), I would begin with a disclosure.
I am an ardent fan of all kinds of cynical non-disclosures that masquerade in the media nowadays in the name of disclosures. Just for the sheer audacity and temerity of the marketers and programme producers in taking the audience as well as the regulators completely for granted. They are fun but seldom disclose anything useful or even comprehensible. This is because (a) the diabolical print media chooses the smallest possible font to publish them, leaving you in dire need of a custom-built, dome magnifier so large that no one has thought of manufacturing it yet; (b) TV channels show the disclosures for part of a fleeting nanosecond so shoddily that the text is fully submerged in grey mass of grains even in HD channels; (c) radio ads fast forward the recorded disclosures so much that they sound like some seriously garbled mickey mouse stuff. Against this background, my disclosure should stand out in its clarity and honesty - `I am not a fan of the various Social Media (SM) platforms at play today'!!
I have gleefully kept myself away from Facebook (FB), despite many friends and relatives trying to goad me into it, with tears welling up in their eyes. Tears, not from any intense emotional experience involving FB or from the futile exercise undertaken with me, but induced by the irritation from the unremitting glare of and excessive exposure to FB screens. What else does one expect when someone spends the better part of every single day, ogling at photos posted by various very remote associates of thrice-removed cousins of old acquaintances' wives one had not seen or heard from in decades! I do have my quota of photos forcibly thrust under my nose by my wife, trilling excitedly `Oh, look, do you remember the lady standing at extreme right? We met her at a new year party in Hong Kong in 1987. She has bloated so much, I would not have recognized her on the street'. If I had not seen my wife since 1987, I would have problem identifying her, so where is the question of recalling the rather vague mug of a complete stranger, with a face as undistinguished as my own (I concede I am exaggerating here, she looked a bit better - anyone would, I guess)? But, life teaches intelligent and perceptive individuals, specifically writers, some valuable lessons, always with large-fonted, screaming, red warnings that they be ignored at one's own peril. That learning kicks in reflexively in such times of need and I promptly say `Yes, yes, I know. She has changed so much', hoping to ward off the looming ordeal of going through a slideshow of 186 more photos on the same subject. Thus, even after assiduously avoiding FB like the plague, I am subjected to the painful ritual of resurrecting unknown ghosts from the past every single day.
The next day, I am put under the yoke and led to look at some other page on FB and I see that someone had posted an exuberant comment on the same photo that `shocked' us the previous day - `Oh, Suma, you know what.....you look as divine and lovely as you were thirty years back, not a change in you'. And, this is the true blue reason for FB's popularity - its inherent and unfailing support for prevarication at various levels. I realise I am suicidally wading into deep and murky waters because retribution is going to be swift and clinical closer at home. But honesty and integrity are of utmost importance to any scribe and and I will have to take the consequences!! Here it is. From the comfort of one's home, one can lie through the teeth all one wants on FB without being `embarrassed' or `discovered'. Simply because that is truly par for the course. The grainiest of photos gets fulsome praise - `Wow, that is an awesome photo; such clarity and a beautiful angle' with the small but seemingly harmless barb at the end `but where are you in that and who are the others'?? The ubiquitous idli or parantha someone had made and posted pictures of, attains epicurean status based entirely on visuals and becomes the stuff Greek gods and goddesses should be fine-dining on. This, even as folks at home are using chain-saws and other heavy-duty implements in tandem to break down the rock-hard idli into edible pieces or tear the rubbery parantha into bits!! Why would anyone display such photos? Prior to FB, did you ever hear of anyone taking a photograph of a sandwich or chapatti and showing to friends visiting home?? When did such things become singularly photogenic all of a sudden? Just because there is a platform and there is an audience - come on, give me a break!! Every single dress, however tawdry and garish it is, worn by some friend is `lovely' if not `gorgeous', when the actually muttered-under-the-breath response is `why would anyone pay oodles of money to buy something like that'??
So, FB comes through as nothing if not a platform for narcissistic groups of relatively jobless friends and acquaintances who want to be scratching and massaging some their collective backs incessantly in the name of communicating. Access is given selectively so that those who are likely to be honest, if not critical, in their opinion, are blocked or kept away. If you notice, no one has anything negative to say - it is almost like Utopia - because that would be like insulting someone in the midst of others. Not done, terribly uncivil and impolite, we would rather do lip-service. I wish people are really that nice to each other always. And a lot of junk to go through, to boot, tirelessly. You never know when and where you will miss one nice little juicy nugget of gossip or whatever, so sift through everything carefully!! Based on what I have seen so far with majority of users, FB is used to glorify the absolutely mundane, satisfy the urge to see oneself on the screen incessantly and glibly express shallow and blatantly false opinions to keep others happy, so that they can reciprocate.
I use Whatsapp, only because it helps me send messages to people overseas without a charge, for now. I am also a member of a group of prankster friends, who used to email extensively earlier, to be communicating. Since this group formed, there are less and less email messages, more and more videos and forwards of jokes. And, throw in some 7 close friends who are in a perennially chatty mood and are looking for things to do, there are lots of messages flowing through, criss-crossing a few subjects at a time, since each participant begins something new, lest he not be left behind. The result is unadulterated confusion that parallels Arnab Goswami's prime time shows with people bawling out from eight different square boxes on the TV screen - make it nine, I forgot the prime mover, who bawls the loudest!! This can be injurious to health and reputation, as I found out recently. One post showed a photo of a one group member's puja room on the Chittirai Vishu day. I was doing parallel processing on the PC and the phone, so it took a bit of time to send an one-liner in response to that photo, saying `Nice one, I wish I am with you!'. And I unsuspectingly went back to work on the PC. After half an hour I checked the phone again and there were a flurry of messages, most of them jeering and leering in tone - having a hearty laugh at me for my response. What had happened was, between that photo of the puja room and my response, someone had forwarded a D-grade photo of a F-grade semi nude actress, with the customary morphing and my comment appeared as a response to that. The wives of friends in my whatsapp group have their own whatsapp group and they had their share of merriment when they came to know. I survived my wife looking daggers at me and escaped further punitive action - bless her soul, she had an off-day I think! We continue to use Whatsapp for frivolous stuff and honestly, if it is yanked off, we will all go back to email without too much fuss. And the quality of communication will probably improve!
Content-wise, tweets have the potential to be pithy, funny and engaging in the right hands, but that happens pretty unevenly, I am told - I do not use Twitter at all. A friend with serious antipathy to Twitter says the quality of comments is rather low-grade overall and he insists on holding up a placard saying `Twitter is for Twits'. Going a bit too far, I think.
Professional networks superficially seem no different. People who hated my guts while working together are now seeking me out to be `linked' and insisting on unilaterally endorsing me for the same skills/capabilities which caused them to take umbrage earlier. I recall the days when they fiercely sought divine intervention for deliverance from me because they thought human intervention was not going to be adequate. I would like to believe they have changed, but actually they are just trying to be nice now that they are out of reach, I guess.
Well, I am told SM platforms have uses beyond the frivolous in other spheres like business and commerce and their reach is obviously a humongous plus! I have also read that FB is ruining the lives of youngsters by exposing the vulnerable ones to exploitation at a tender age and by moving them away from real world contacts, thereby rendering them relatively reclusive in their dealings with others. I confess I am not qualified to comment on these aspects of SM. I wanted to share the impact of SM, as I have felt and have done that. I also realize I could be way off the mark!!
Those of you who worship all the above SM platforms, engage with these robustly for the best part of your day and are hurt by my insensitive observations, please go ahead and stick a photo of mine you may have (if you dont, stick something and imagine it is me) and throw darts at that till your angst dissipates!!
I am an ardent fan of all kinds of cynical non-disclosures that masquerade in the media nowadays in the name of disclosures. Just for the sheer audacity and temerity of the marketers and programme producers in taking the audience as well as the regulators completely for granted. They are fun but seldom disclose anything useful or even comprehensible. This is because (a) the diabolical print media chooses the smallest possible font to publish them, leaving you in dire need of a custom-built, dome magnifier so large that no one has thought of manufacturing it yet; (b) TV channels show the disclosures for part of a fleeting nanosecond so shoddily that the text is fully submerged in grey mass of grains even in HD channels; (c) radio ads fast forward the recorded disclosures so much that they sound like some seriously garbled mickey mouse stuff. Against this background, my disclosure should stand out in its clarity and honesty - `I am not a fan of the various Social Media (SM) platforms at play today'!!
I have gleefully kept myself away from Facebook (FB), despite many friends and relatives trying to goad me into it, with tears welling up in their eyes. Tears, not from any intense emotional experience involving FB or from the futile exercise undertaken with me, but induced by the irritation from the unremitting glare of and excessive exposure to FB screens. What else does one expect when someone spends the better part of every single day, ogling at photos posted by various very remote associates of thrice-removed cousins of old acquaintances' wives one had not seen or heard from in decades! I do have my quota of photos forcibly thrust under my nose by my wife, trilling excitedly `Oh, look, do you remember the lady standing at extreme right? We met her at a new year party in Hong Kong in 1987. She has bloated so much, I would not have recognized her on the street'. If I had not seen my wife since 1987, I would have problem identifying her, so where is the question of recalling the rather vague mug of a complete stranger, with a face as undistinguished as my own (I concede I am exaggerating here, she looked a bit better - anyone would, I guess)? But, life teaches intelligent and perceptive individuals, specifically writers, some valuable lessons, always with large-fonted, screaming, red warnings that they be ignored at one's own peril. That learning kicks in reflexively in such times of need and I promptly say `Yes, yes, I know. She has changed so much', hoping to ward off the looming ordeal of going through a slideshow of 186 more photos on the same subject. Thus, even after assiduously avoiding FB like the plague, I am subjected to the painful ritual of resurrecting unknown ghosts from the past every single day.
The next day, I am put under the yoke and led to look at some other page on FB and I see that someone had posted an exuberant comment on the same photo that `shocked' us the previous day - `Oh, Suma, you know what.....you look as divine and lovely as you were thirty years back, not a change in you'. And, this is the true blue reason for FB's popularity - its inherent and unfailing support for prevarication at various levels. I realise I am suicidally wading into deep and murky waters because retribution is going to be swift and clinical closer at home. But honesty and integrity are of utmost importance to any scribe and and I will have to take the consequences!! Here it is. From the comfort of one's home, one can lie through the teeth all one wants on FB without being `embarrassed' or `discovered'. Simply because that is truly par for the course. The grainiest of photos gets fulsome praise - `Wow, that is an awesome photo; such clarity and a beautiful angle' with the small but seemingly harmless barb at the end `but where are you in that and who are the others'?? The ubiquitous idli or parantha someone had made and posted pictures of, attains epicurean status based entirely on visuals and becomes the stuff Greek gods and goddesses should be fine-dining on. This, even as folks at home are using chain-saws and other heavy-duty implements in tandem to break down the rock-hard idli into edible pieces or tear the rubbery parantha into bits!! Why would anyone display such photos? Prior to FB, did you ever hear of anyone taking a photograph of a sandwich or chapatti and showing to friends visiting home?? When did such things become singularly photogenic all of a sudden? Just because there is a platform and there is an audience - come on, give me a break!! Every single dress, however tawdry and garish it is, worn by some friend is `lovely' if not `gorgeous', when the actually muttered-under-the-breath response is `why would anyone pay oodles of money to buy something like that'??
So, FB comes through as nothing if not a platform for narcissistic groups of relatively jobless friends and acquaintances who want to be scratching and massaging some their collective backs incessantly in the name of communicating. Access is given selectively so that those who are likely to be honest, if not critical, in their opinion, are blocked or kept away. If you notice, no one has anything negative to say - it is almost like Utopia - because that would be like insulting someone in the midst of others. Not done, terribly uncivil and impolite, we would rather do lip-service. I wish people are really that nice to each other always. And a lot of junk to go through, to boot, tirelessly. You never know when and where you will miss one nice little juicy nugget of gossip or whatever, so sift through everything carefully!! Based on what I have seen so far with majority of users, FB is used to glorify the absolutely mundane, satisfy the urge to see oneself on the screen incessantly and glibly express shallow and blatantly false opinions to keep others happy, so that they can reciprocate.
I use Whatsapp, only because it helps me send messages to people overseas without a charge, for now. I am also a member of a group of prankster friends, who used to email extensively earlier, to be communicating. Since this group formed, there are less and less email messages, more and more videos and forwards of jokes. And, throw in some 7 close friends who are in a perennially chatty mood and are looking for things to do, there are lots of messages flowing through, criss-crossing a few subjects at a time, since each participant begins something new, lest he not be left behind. The result is unadulterated confusion that parallels Arnab Goswami's prime time shows with people bawling out from eight different square boxes on the TV screen - make it nine, I forgot the prime mover, who bawls the loudest!! This can be injurious to health and reputation, as I found out recently. One post showed a photo of a one group member's puja room on the Chittirai Vishu day. I was doing parallel processing on the PC and the phone, so it took a bit of time to send an one-liner in response to that photo, saying `Nice one, I wish I am with you!'. And I unsuspectingly went back to work on the PC. After half an hour I checked the phone again and there were a flurry of messages, most of them jeering and leering in tone - having a hearty laugh at me for my response. What had happened was, between that photo of the puja room and my response, someone had forwarded a D-grade photo of a F-grade semi nude actress, with the customary morphing and my comment appeared as a response to that. The wives of friends in my whatsapp group have their own whatsapp group and they had their share of merriment when they came to know. I survived my wife looking daggers at me and escaped further punitive action - bless her soul, she had an off-day I think! We continue to use Whatsapp for frivolous stuff and honestly, if it is yanked off, we will all go back to email without too much fuss. And the quality of communication will probably improve!
Content-wise, tweets have the potential to be pithy, funny and engaging in the right hands, but that happens pretty unevenly, I am told - I do not use Twitter at all. A friend with serious antipathy to Twitter says the quality of comments is rather low-grade overall and he insists on holding up a placard saying `Twitter is for Twits'. Going a bit too far, I think.
Professional networks superficially seem no different. People who hated my guts while working together are now seeking me out to be `linked' and insisting on unilaterally endorsing me for the same skills/capabilities which caused them to take umbrage earlier. I recall the days when they fiercely sought divine intervention for deliverance from me because they thought human intervention was not going to be adequate. I would like to believe they have changed, but actually they are just trying to be nice now that they are out of reach, I guess.
Well, I am told SM platforms have uses beyond the frivolous in other spheres like business and commerce and their reach is obviously a humongous plus! I have also read that FB is ruining the lives of youngsters by exposing the vulnerable ones to exploitation at a tender age and by moving them away from real world contacts, thereby rendering them relatively reclusive in their dealings with others. I confess I am not qualified to comment on these aspects of SM. I wanted to share the impact of SM, as I have felt and have done that. I also realize I could be way off the mark!!
Those of you who worship all the above SM platforms, engage with these robustly for the best part of your day and are hurt by my insensitive observations, please go ahead and stick a photo of mine you may have (if you dont, stick something and imagine it is me) and throw darts at that till your angst dissipates!!
5 comments:
Please send me a photo of yours. I don't have one. I would like to start the exercise you have suggested straight away.
S. Venkatarama Iyer
Mr.Iyer wanted some darts also, preferably poisoned to be sent to him along with the photo, but I politely declined to entertain requests for ammunition citing the already unprofitable nature of blogging business!!
Varad
I am not guilty of twitting or what'sapping! I have no idea how it works. But may be worth it for some unexpected visions!
FB I do use to play scrabbles. It is easy to cheat! And grumble once in a while.
But I am impressed at the way you walk on thin ice or should I say walking in the middle of a Bengaluru one way street sans a foot path. Praneeta's genes are surely forgiving!
Take care
Comment from Susheela Venkataraman, received via email - Excellent piece, Varad
couldn't agree more - the inane stuff out there is boring to say the least and rapidly, FB is turning into another dreaded medium, much like the TV serials
BTW, if it helps, 2 much used epithets are 'awesome' and 'stunning'. a stunning sunset, i get, a stunning dress just because it is orange in colour, no!
Regards
susheela
I access all the three -FB, Twitter and What's app rather regularly. While FB and Twitter provide information on subjects that interest me thru TED, New Science etc, What's App is more for fun. There is a magical button on FB, which is LIKE. I frequently use it to convey my appreciation, or denouncement or even sympathy depending on the occasion. I read the comments others write with a snigger or smile or surprise or sometimes sadness. All these social media are good provided they are used within limits. Even Amrit, the nectar of Gods has to be taken in small measures. You have done the right thing by pointing out the inherent, inveterate human tendencies and frailties to misuse or malevolently manipulate such media. It is always a pleasure to read English, the way you wield it.
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