The irrelevance of social media

The world of social media is becoming a very weird place. People are getting disillusioned by being on social media but are too addicted and too far down the rabbit hole to let it go. And the result? For example, too many posts are coming out on Facebook with the intent to enlighten people about why and how we are wasting time on social media. But where are these posts popping up? On social media itself. So people have to connect to social media to know why social media is not good for them. Sounds like cutting down the same branch of the tree we are sitting on?

But all this vile is not without reason though. There is growing awareness that the new millennium generation is connected to technology and devices and not to nature and this is weakening their body immunity to diseases and eroding their physical and mental well being. But why blame them? There was no internet in my town and mobile technology was insanely expensive when I was completing my engineering course. Just 5 years down the line, I saw a good friend’s brother carrying a mobile phone to college. Adopting to new technologies is one thing but letting ourselves become enslaved to ecosystems built around new technologies with the sole intent of building business empires and collecting our personal data to be used against us and then whining about it is plain ridiculous. Desiring for an urban life with all modern amenities and comforts and then expecting our kids to grow up by playing in mud and rain is total absurdity. We are destroying the world nature has given us to build our own world of brick and mortar and jungles of trees and concrete cannot coexist.

The new generation kids are growing up in sophisticated city life where the first things they comprehend are mobile phones, laptops, tablets and high end cars. I am quite sure what would first come to their minds at the mention of the word tablet would be the computer device rather than medicine. Relationships are made and broken on social media now. Emotions are expressed through the internet and this is getting pushed to the point where people are even streaming their suicides live now. Looking up or stalking people on the internet by going through their activities on social media, be it for professional or personal reasons has become a common phenomenon now. Video resumes are increasingly becoming a requirement now. Even marriages are getting solemnized over the internet. The 5 senses with which we were created to communicate with each other have lost their relevance to technology. We have been sucked up into a virtual world where we have also become devices of sorts. These are the costs we are paying in return for our mad rush towards development and a life that is getting increasingly automated.

The objective of all social media platforms is to understand our behavior and track our actions. The massive amount of data that is getting collected can be used in a million different ways, depending on who is using it and what their purpose is. The data is being analyzed and used for sending targeted advertisements to users based on their online buying preferences, show news items based on their reading preferences and even track criminals. The possibility of data being misused can be huge. All of this is making me more wary of my presence on social media, except on LinkedIn. But there is something very significant happening on LinkedIn now that most people do not seem to comprehend. LinkedIn is a hub to create a professional network which means our network should only have people who know us directly from either our academic or professional life and who can endorse our credentials and recommend us. What LinkedIn is doing now is, based on how strong our profiles are and how active we are on LinkedIn, they are recommending us to connect to other people and vice versa, with the result that we get connection requests from total strangers. A bigger network of people does not mean it is an effective and useful network of people. Getting connected to random people can end up ruining our lives because we do not know the kind of people they might be connected to and a possible search for a criminal on social media might land us in front of the authorities even without us having any direct connection to the criminal.

We do not come across the best and most important people in our lives on social media. We always find them through our 5 senses and this is something social media can never take over. They might be our friends on social media as well but we have accepted each other the way we are and whatever we do on social media never matters to them because they know from us directly what is going on in our lives. So the status updates we keep posting on social media is for the rest of the people in our network. Broadcasting about our lives to people who are not important in our lives is just showing off about ourselves and I see no other logic in it. What is more ridiculous is, we actually spend a lot of our time reading through status updates of people who are not important in our lives. This realization has what has prompted me to reduce my foot prints on social media platforms and I use them now only to read articles that interests me, publish posts that can provide information to people in my network and air my views to build awareness on anything that affects people’s lives negatively. The life I used to have without phone, computer devices and internet seems like a fantasy now. Going off the grid is quite a fancy word for me because that’s how I started and lived for a major part of my life. Someday, I am hoping to take out all the clutter I am living with now and go back into that amazing life.