I’ve been having a bit of a “its complicated” relationship phase with facebook for a while now. I’ve ended up in a situation, where I have people on my friend list whom I have barely known in college and school days; I mean we were hardly friends, we just happened to study together in a 1000+ ppl college!!! and then I have relatives whom I have barely met in real life, and am in a situation where un-friending them might create a family feud etc.
The worst reason for me starting to dislike facebook is also because I’m getting seriously irked with some of the status messages I see on my facebook timeline. Here’s a sneak peak into it:
1) “xi wang ni ching chung dong” or something like that …read one status update. I mean come on guys, if you were to write a facebook update like that in a language I have no clue on, at least exclude me from that status update and share it with a subset of ppl who know the language. I have no idea if you said “my dog peed on my lap” or “I had the best time of my life”!
2) “RIP my dearest uncle/ aunt/ relative” status updates. What do you want me to do after reading that status update anyway? Would my condolences make any sense to you? Would they sound real? What’s unbelievable was that there were 2-3 people who actually went ahead and liked that status update too. Spare me from these details please.
3) “On my way from Dubai to Abu Dhabi” status updates from a guy who works in Abu Dhabi and lives in Dubai. Who cares..really. It’s not as if you’re vacationing in Capetown or Bangkok that I want to hear about this update. Give me a break!!
Then there was the “my dog has urinary infection :(” status just when I was about to have dinner; “Jesus loves you, so read the bible every day”..and a few more such brilliant nuggets, but I’ll spare you the details.
If on one side, I have a bunch of status update friends like the above, on the other end of the spectrum I have a bunch of “friends” who are trying really hard to present a perfect, beautiful personality through their update while omitting all the deep and disturbing realities of their life. I wonder if Facebook is worth all this effort..really!!!
...and then someone came and told me this in favor of facebook “Facebook is like that, Anup. It's a snapshot of a moment, which you can sit back and enjoy like those old faded photographs of childhood. Everything you are is what you make of it, if you decide to portray a "perfect, beautiful person," then that is who you're pretending to be. Facebook didn't ask you to take on that persona, you decided that all on your own. Facebook really is a man in the mirror”.
P.S: my twitter profile
