Face the Book

Face the Book

Don't look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there... ~Confucius

This short blog is written on these assumptions: Irresponsible and hopeless sharing - posts are not an exact mirror image of your exact self - controlled paradox.

Facebook has 1.1 billion active users and 95 billion friendship links. Facebook users have potentially tremendous reach in a quick time; any shared content only needs to pass a few steps across the network to reach a substantial fraction of the world’s population. As it has no peer-reviewing system in place, we need to think a second before posting anything.

Facebook users enjoys several advantages, it makes productive, boosts self-esteem, improves your love life etc. (all these taken from acceptable sources). One immediate advantage comes to my mind is that you can peer others content from a secrete vantage point and feel perfectly eudaemonistic. I would like to take on two interesting stuff, one is our own identity when doing an act on facebook (to like or to comment, here) and the other is hopeless oversharing.

“To Like” is an action you perform with a computer mouse, rather than our own state of mind. Facebook is an imaginary world where we believe a mere act of like is complete endorsement of our state of mind by others. So the act of “To Like” on facebook is not an accurate way of reflecting our agreement with something being posted, so don’t get mislead. Different people have different way of saying things; a novelist would say he might need 500 pages of heavy prose to express an emotion more precisely. Instead of living a social life we rely on likes and comments for being socially alive.

We live in the age of hopeless oversharing, firstly what’s likely to happen with this oversharing is…..nothing. This oversharing on facebook is getting to a point where nothing substantial and genuine can be distilled out of this never ending and dubious information overload. We are extremely in a helpless situation to judge what is accurate and what is not. Heaps of random baseless stuff going viral, are we taking a second to believe and share it.

What we need is substantial efforts from people on ground level, rather than “facebook warriors” sitting on their couches liking and sharing endlessly with no tangible outcome. Remember your status on FB is neither an indication or a measure of your responsibility on particular issue, nor a measure of your patriotism, nor an indicator for your commitment toward solving a social problem. Those exchanges of empty words only will get you nowhere.

Instead of this endless sharing of religious and political nonsense, think beyond that. Come up with actual solutions, think about how to breed creativity, redefine how we operate in democracy so that big/small, rich/poor all are counted, ideas on how you can impact society with what you have studied all these years, inspiring ideas for masses to respect woman or atleast this (which I believe to the core) helping someone in your own family instead of a pointless philanthropy.

Fill the world with good will and happy feelings.