Another small price of silence
Time is contagious. However, unlike other diseases, there is no cure for it. Only after reaching the distant future that you can actually make sense of what happened. In normal life, spoken words bear a strong resonance as they confer on the listener an emotional attachment that written words fail to achieve. There is a disadvantage (obviously!) to it too. Eardrums have a short memory. What was said and how it was said don’t last long enough on a given psyche. This temporary nature of communication is milked by textual formats of speech.
Let’s say, once upon a time in 1997, you wrote something in your school essay — you described the joys of being an adult in terms of the number of chocolates and ice cream you’d be able to eat without anybody’s interruption—and if those yellowed pages are still around, there is no ambiguity on what you meant. Everything is on record. Where exactly you thought about it and when you grew out of that thought are secondary questions here. That’s the power of written words.
Which brings us to social media. There are endless benefits and downsides of being online on an everyday basis. But, to put it not-so-subtly, the sheer amount of “record” afforded by the system is mind-numbing. What you tweeted that drunken night in 2009 is still available and so are the clumsy replies you posted on your friend’s status message in 2011. The very essence of verbal exchange is fulfilled by the Internet like never before. A page might have gone missing from a book and a book might be missing from the library but what you posted once haunts you like a deathless ghost. Unless, of course, you gather the common sense to delete those undesirable contents. Henceforth, raising the bigger question: Are they really deleted or are they floating around in the celestial Web?
I asked myself such questions back in 2010 after reading some hard-hitting articles on the vastness of digital footprint. As a reaction, I turned silent on Twitter, and eventually on other platforms, during the early months of 2010. Which basically meant that I didn’t engage in public conversations anymore; no more group discussions for me. This abrupt decision had its upsides as well as side-effects. The former occurred with the amount of time I saved from NOT explaining my posts; I posted my bullshit and left the scene. The latter occurred with the amount of misunderstanding I perpetuated with my self-imposed silence; it’s amazing how netizens love to assume stuff. Most people took me for a snob for not responding to their tweets. Quite understandable because nobody likes to see somebody else set the rules of engagement on the so-called social networking sites.
Well, I did.
If I were to regret this decision, I’d have changed my online tactics. But fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), I never bothered with overreaction. There were many instances when falsehood became the norm as they knew that I won’t bother to clarify on the timeline. On the other hand, I made genuine attempts to privately stretch out to those who were calm and conversable. As long as I did what I felt was fine, nothing else mattered. That said, there is no denying that you pay a price for silence. Of late, I’ve begun wondering about all the fabulous opportunities I missed just because I wouldn’t engage publicly. To be frank, I don’t see that as a price for silence. It’s more of a small price for peace of mind.
You can’t have it all, now, can you?
I completed 9 years on Twitter last week and have been on Facebook for over a decade. Except for a few days in between, I’ve been mostly active throughout. As we step in to 2018, we are learning more and more about the potent nature of the Internet. As a sentient species, a lot of us desire to be remembered as well as forgotten — remembered for our awesomeness and forgotten for our lousiness. What you typed may not remain with you but it stays forever on an enormous land called Cyberspace. With social media, you can strike a balance between the two desires. It’s entirely up to you how you plan to do so. Like it or not, you will be judged for what you said. The question should be, who did you say it to? If the answer is yourself, maybe you’ll get the benefit of doubt.
Or maybe not.
