The hindi phrase of “naikikarkuaeinmeindaal” is now more appropriately called “kuch bhi kar facebook pe daal”
“Sahil and Prerna (names changed) got divorced! It was a shocking news. They had just returned from holidaying in Florence, and Prerna’s timeline gave a complete contrary picture of their life. They “seemed” perfectly happy and in love with each other. They were regular in updating their status pledging love for each other on birthdays and anniversaries. No one could tell that there were cracks in their paradise.
Facebook and other social media dais have become a virtual window from which one can peep in and see what’s happening, and the beauty is we can show them what we want, a perfectly unblemished picture of us and our lives. Just like Sahil and Prerna. In this is alternate world of Facebook and Instagram we live for others, our opinions, feelings, perspective, even who we want to support in the next football match is not really ours but it is an outcome of “what’s trending”.
The dark side of social media is dangerous and sad:
- A 17 year old girl in England jumped from a moving train to commit suicide because her obscene pictures had gone viral on the internet, she took a picture of herself before jumping and posted it with a caption “the last picture before I die”.
- Two boys aged 20 and 22 died while trying to take a “daredevil selfie” of an upcoming trains on the railway track in India.
These scary facts make one wonder if the urge to get a compliment and to portray oneself as an ultra-cool human is more important than surviving. Man is sure a social animal, and social media is taking it to another level. Where we travel not to explore but to post pictures, we comment strongly on various subjects we don’t know about, having an opinion has become mandatory or you will be called an idiot.
“The other side of social media exposure is, increasing stress, anxiety, depression, low self- esteem, eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder (which is the persistent preoccupation with one’s flaws in appearance) among people who are high on Neuroticism.” says psychologist Aanchal Johari. Psychological studies have shown that people who are highly active on Facebook have a low life satisfaction as compared to others who are not so active. It also leads to decline in subjective wellbeing and increase in loneliness. Their timid and hollow confidence gets boosted by every like and comment they get on their multiple filtered pictures. Traveling, before the social media took us by storm used to be for exploring and for one’s inner happiness, but now it has become solely to boast to those in our fiend list. We look for sunlight just because selfies come better in it. All the right things are done for wrong reasons. Social media is slowly spilling over our soul. We have stopped living in the world that was created by God we are now living in the world of Zuckerberg who gets paid every time we open the doors to that universe.
This emergence of two parallel worlds has affected our younger generation the most it surely has its positives nonetheless. We know our ministers better than we ever knew; we know the economic and financial policies that our government is framing. We sure have developed a habit of “reading” and are much better informed.
There is no denying the fact that it has revolutionized information broadcasting and is a great platform to voice our opinion,and the awareness on everything is highest but it is making us also virtual human beings whose thinking, actions and feelings are externally generated.