2004. Facebook (as we see it today) was born, with the intent of letting people be in contact with the important people in their life.
"Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life"... so is written on its home page.
It's a really vivid world inside. The moment I open my FB homepage, several notifications are already flashing on the top blue ribbon. Sometimes I even come across a couple of friend requests from some long forgotten friend. Shrouded by oblivion, I exert my grey cells to see if they could come up with an interpretable result. If they do....Confirm tab is pressed, else...... who cares!! Confirm it anyway.....after all; the whole affair culminates into a concert of acquiring maximum number of friends.
Mr. Zuckerberg would have turned into an “accidental”, youngest billionaire with this “Facebook” mania but I see rubble of several careers and would-have-been billionaires below it, like the children who do nothing all day long but sit before a computer with the Facebook page open, in some isolated corners of their homes. The only noise that one would hear coming from them would be the keys being tapped. They can sit all day long on that screen without turning their neck or blinking.....(I wonder if they even breath). The membership to Facebook is open to you if you 13 years or above. I don’t understand why a 13 year old child needs Facebook?? To connect with his kindergarten friend where he used to go?? What would be his status?? (“I’m a Complan boy!!” I suppose...or “I reached 4 feet today, my mom is Proud” and his buddy would comment “HEHE, m already 4’6” :P”).
Anyways.....the whole idea is that one would be happier if he/she connects to more and more people. Oh yes! People do seem a lot happy in their photographs and profile statuses but they are sheer skewed misinterpretations of their actual lives, showcasing it in the best possible way. The world of FB is surreal and far removed from reality.
Every now and then you would see one of your friends’ pic, drinking beer and surrounded by chicks and would make you envy him. If you are one of the “desperates” you would be fuming within seconds to see some friend of yours’ Relationship Status suddenly switched to “engaged”. Some of my friends have 500+ friends, I don’t think I could remember so many people. From my own friend list’s 269 friends, I chat with hardly 50 of ‘em. One of my friends has put me under heavy psychological pressure by developing six packs, while I am still that same “walking skeletal meskwork with a 5mm dermal cover”. Then I see one of my friends, studying at the NUS, Singapore, flashing the status “SEP at University of Calgary, Canada, should I go or not...plz help!!!”...I mean I would have gone straightaway! Why do you even need to ask?? Then I see an acquaintance getting a 19.2lac offer from GE or something; a girl surrounded by gift boxes (which might be empty) she got on her birthday or Valentine’s (which would shortly ignite a “fence” between me and my girlfriend); friends on exotic vacations; everyone laughing, giggling, getting drunk. Everyone seems so happy, content, employed, brawny, and adventurous.
You’ll label yourself “abject” with certitude.
Suddenly you realise with depressing alacrity that everyone around you is getting lucrative job offers, holidaying, bungee-jumping, spelunking, partying, constantly shopping, in a football team, gymming, getting engaged and getting prettier.
All this is surreal, people’s attempt to flaunt the best facade of their life while shoving the other down somewhere in the darkness. This is not a genuine landscape of their lives. And if it is then I think that there is something terribly wrong with my stuck life where everything I achieved was only after a struggle.
