Social media has nothing to offer
In 2010, when I was not yet 13 years old, I created an email account by lying about my age. In the following year, Facebook and Instagram both seemed to be quite popular to me. Facebook was already a popular website before that. That’s when Instagram also came on the scene and started to become popular.
I opened my account on the site immediately. I don’t know what to do with it. All I can do is send a message and send a Facebook request to someone I don’t know. When I created the account, I had only one school friend. He had come to India from London to study, so he had had the opportunity to use it before. I used to see him at school from morning till evening. But I will message him on Facebook in the evening. If he is absent from school often, he might ask me what happened that day and if he has anything to do tomorrow. I used it for the same purpose. Apart from that, there was a Telugu boy I was Facebook friends with and we used to talk about movies together. I came to know through him that Pawan Kalyan was a powerstar. I thought that Srinivasan was powerstar.
After sometime two to three friends joined Facebook. If they all upload a photo, they will ping me to like it. If I don’t like it, there will be a confrontation. Beyond that, there is nothing to be done in facebook.
On the other side , Instagram is also just as popular. At that time there isn’t even a messaging facility. It’s a place where people can share photos and we can like it and that’s all there is to it.
Meantime WhatsApp and Twitter emerged at this time. Twitter was a great way to connect with celebrities. There is no way to post a Status on WhatsApp like today. Today’s About me section in whatsapp is where you would put the status of the day. No video call, voice call, or voice message.Then Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp. They started giving updates frequently. This growth continued rapidly over the next five years.
But what does all these sites offer us today in 2022? Nothing. But we use it, and every ten minutes we take it and see what’s in it.
If you login into these sites straight without using it for a week, just one week, you don’t understand what’s going on there. It takes time to understand who is insulting whom or sometimes we couldn’t figure out who is pouring hatred on whom. That is mainly why all social networking sites are used today.
We also use it to prove others. Whom we are trying to prove through photos, statuses, reels that we went there & We’re going to eat here? If our happiness is in these uploads, then the question arises whether we really enjoy place we go and the food we eat. If this that happiness lies in uploads, is it worth all the effort we put into achieving it?
I don’t think so, it’s only in the last ten years that this place for happiness has changed, and besides, it’s artificial. If not for all these things today, what would we be doing? I don’t know either. But I admit that after a week of not using them, I get really bored. It’s boring because the people who I used to talk is using social media every time. Some could say that don’t use it, If I don’t like it. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use them either. All I’m saying is take a moment to think about why you use social networking sites.
It’s ironic that I can talk to all of you through this same social networking site. In fact, it works well for that. Because I can’t go and tell this everyone in person. Because of this we are losing real conversations.
Some may say that social networking is all about how we use it, and rightly so. Few people use social media to expand their business because it cannot be denied that this is the fastest way to reach people today.
But are the rest actually using it correctly? We don’t need to show it, we just have to think and feel it. As far as I’ve come to think of it, social media has nothing to offer me. It doesn’t seem to bring any joy from using it throughout the day.
Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It’s a cacophony, it’s like a madness I think that’s been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.
Martin Scorsese
