The Social Network!!

Human is a social animal. However, clichéd this statement seems, we still believe in this. In fact the developers of social networking site religiously follow this phrase. This phrase has led to the advent of almost all social networking sites.

A few days back I was reading a blog of my friend, she mentioned that no one is alone in this socially active society. These sites help us to get in touch with the whole world. We know about the FIFA WC champion, the bigg boss house winner, the earthquake in Nepal within fraction of seconds that too without reading a newspaper. Whenever we are in doubt about anything under the sky we can just google it. Even when we are lost Google comes to our rescue thanks to google maps!!

The world is shrinking, thanks to these sites. Last weekend my nephew went to USA for his higher studies and due to Facebook and WhatsApp it was easier for us to know his whereabouts. I imagined before Facebook to connect with someone would have been so difficult. Today, with Facebook, twitter and WhatsApp we can connect to anyone and at any time. With the help of these sites we can find your lost friends, meet new friends, fall in love and even get married 😛 We know about our friends’ last trips, their relationship status, and their marital status through the great interface of these sites. How easily we are getting close to the distant friend in a different time zone!!

However, many a times I feel with the social network we are becoming lonely. I remember in an interview Kareena Kapoor mentioned that she usually sends text messages to her husband Saif Ali Khan who is in the next room glued to the social networking sites. This is true for almost all the couples in this socially active world.

I agree to the fact that with the advent of the social networking sites we have become aware of the lives of the people who are at a far distance, but at the same time we have become distant to those who are close to us. The personal catch ups, phone calls, and those pub hangouts are replaced by a WhatsApp chat group or a Google hangout. We click pictures to upload on social networking sites and to tell others that we are enjoying our lives.

We upload status; we tweet about the social issues, so as to make others believe that we are concerned about the society. There are pictures about the places we visit, about the food we eat, about the house we bought, about the alcohol we drink; there is a picture for everything and anything. I think the developers of these sites have clearly understood the human tendency that we like to know about someone else’s life, we take pleasure in gossiping about someone else’s life, we like attention and we like to be followed. We have 1000+ Facebook friends and twitter followers but we don’t have a single best friend whom we can count always. We like to take dig at peoples’ personal relationship status, their personal lives and take pleasure when their lives are disturbing. We believe that if we share our happiness it grows ten folds, but while doing all this aren’t we living a shallow life??

“now it’s computers and more computers and soon everybody will have one, 3-year-olds will have computers and everybody will know everything about everybody else long before they meet them. nobody will want to meet anybody else ever again and everybody will be a recluse
like I am now.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Continual Condition: Poems