Why I feel like I am a social media loser
As a social media professional, I am living the biggest contradiction of my life. I can see the digital black hole that the present is getting sucked into. And the cruel truth to be told is that my present karma is to fuel this gargantuan monster.
Personally, I am a social media loser! I am of the belief that what I eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner is nobody else’s business so why Instagram it! I am the most ineligible profile on Facebook as I would hate to put my friends through an emotional wringer by posting a selfie stream from the most exotic holiday destination while they are sweating it out at their workstations. I have yet to reach the level of negativity where I can spend most of my productive hours trolling the Twitterati.
Compressed in a tweet: I am neither an #exhibitionist nor a #narcissist & certainly not a #sadist. Yet, social media is my calling & the contradiction thereof.
Interestingly, I actually fall into the category of people who lose beautiful friendships from childhood, merely because I cannot keep up with the hundred-something pings on the WhatsApp group every time I check them. The peers who are online anywhere, anytime have become more precious relationship assets and I am the unsocial snob!
Having reviewed my somewhat unimpressive social profiling, you may club me with many others in my generation who feel social media and all things digital have eaten into beautiful dinner conversations and killed all shades of social sensitivities and courtesies.
That said, I have been evolving shamelessly, drowning, head first, into the lifestyle of the millennials. For example, some of the most profound conversations with my 16-year son have happened on WhatsApp. Do I like that? I detest it! Were the conversations a success? Absolutely! It is his medium – his comfort zone, where he can communicate emotions without inhibitions, sometimes just with an emoticon. Darned contradiction that!
Of late, the likes of me are confounded by the next big one, namely augmented reality. It can take me to my desired destinations in a jiffy. Do I love the experience? No! I am the types who will want to sniff the air and feel the breeze. So probably, next they will throw the immersive 7D my way. There is no escape you see.
Ask the young. There is no place they cannot visit through their AU headgears – they know the streets, the nooks and the corners of far-away lands, sitting in the comforts of their living rooms – that is the bright side. They defeat the biggest of monsters with a click, a tap or a swoosh.
But I dread the underlying risk of them becoming unreal with the digital world depriving them of the real touch and feel experiences. On the day when my son got to ride a chopper for the first time, I found him pensive. Later, he told me the real life experience was very different from flying them low over the seven wonders of the world without being caught and even smashing a few against buildings. It was probably the first time he had experienced the disconnect between the real and the virtual world.
I see this disconnect as the biggest dilemma for his generation which is fed on make-belief digital versions of situations. Inevitably, they will be forced into the real world without their brushes with real-life situations.
Do you see the contradiction? Here I am a prisoner of evolution, of innovation and finally of the digital future that I so hate but cannot escape. I hope mine is the last generation to stand at the cusp of this “To do or not to do” confusion. Generations from here on won’t even recognise the predicament. Hope they manage to stay Real!