Social Media Is For Idiots…
Table number 4 on the second floor.
My mum always said to me that gossip was for those with nothing more intelligent to talk about. Gossip was as bad as blasphemy and if she ever caught me gossiping I’d be sent to my room. I’d never hear my mum gossip, she would always talk about the real things in life and taught me that those were the only things that mattered and I believed her and followed the rules.
I always thought Mum went to the coffee shop in town to read or write, maybe just have some time away from us kids. That was until one day, I sat in the very same coffee shop and realised the exact reason it was her favourite spot. Table 4 on the second floor, if you move the chair just slightly to the left the sun doesn’t shine into your eyes. The bay window offers a panoramic view of the square reaching from Bob’s butchers all the way over to Sally Anne’s sweet shop in the upper half of the town. Not only that but you can trace the village folk from one place to another, you can see when they arrive and when they leave and if you listen carefully enough you can hear their jittery conversations as they pass by. Mum wasn’t having some quiet time to herself, she was people watching.
Now you can understand my surprise when I figured out this secret of hers. The woman who would regularly tell us that being nosey would result in getting our noses chopped off was in fact a nosey parker herself! I couldn’t believe it, how could she stoop to this level, was her own life not exciting enough? Were we boring her so much she had to go looking into other people’s lives to be entertained?!
The very same evening when she returned from work, I confronted her about my shocking revelations at the coffee shop. How could she I exclaimed, how could she be so hypocritical and lie to us all these years. That’s when something even more shocking happened, I realised she wasn’t listening to me, she was on her phone. I yelled at her to get her attention and she turned around and said to me, ‘my friends on Facebook will have a right laugh reading this story!’ In the space of a mere 4 hours not only had my mum become a nosey parker but she’d also become a gossip queen. I was raging with anger, who was this woman who claimed to be my mother? Had the aliens taken over her body, creating glazed eyes that scrolled continuously through a Facebook feed?
Of course, at the age of 12 I didn’t realise how silly my anger was and Mum was right, her friends on Facebook probably did have a jolly good laugh at the story. Now I realise that sitting in a coffee shop observing the people that walk by is one of the most satisfying ways to spend a Saturday afternoon and scrolling through Facebook is a sure-fire way to waste 15 minutes. But thanks to my Mum’s lessons, I know that gossiping, although fun, can be dangerous if the stories aren’t true. Gossip isn’t always fun and people can use gossip to hurt and destroy people. With the invention of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, people can broadcast their gossip to billions of people. Some may think that this is a great invention, their days can be filled with gossip 24/7 and they can find out any detail about a person in a matter of clicks. I agree it’s always fun to Facebook stalk an ex or potential beau, find out that the popular girl in school got fat or see what your professor likes to do in his spare time. But it’s not always a good thing, social media has empowered people to believe they have a right to meddle in other’s personal lives and comment on it. Because they’re sitting behind a tiny screen, people feel it’s okay to judge others, this is where the line has been crossed. Sure, people gossip, it seems to be an innate trait of humans but the moment we start judging people on the gossip we hear about them things become serious.
That’s the exact reason why social media is for idiots. It allows us to judge and feel like we have the privilege to be commenting on other people’s choices. Go and sit in a coffee shop and when Mr and Mrs Perfect walk past go and see if you’d make the comment to their faces about their marriage that you were about to post on Facebook, my guess is you’d probably sit there quietly and continue to sip your coffee in silence.
