The Queer World Of Facebook

Remember those lazy looking weekend mornings? Or an idle sunset in the vastness of a highway drive? Or those count down of milestones as we wait impatiently for the destination to arrive? Do you recall gazing at the mountains from your hotel room on a summer holiday? Have you ever been a part of the serpentine queue at Kolkata Maidan to watch your favorite team play? How many of us still do what we did? Or is it that a changed ‘you’ keep checking the timelines while watching the sublime sun rise at Tiger Hill, or keep searching for comments even while on a jungle safari? Do you miss those ‘all of a sudden’ sunsets during winter evenings as you speed up to your favorite dhaba or do such distance crosses in a zippy as you remain engrossed with your smart phone with charitable likes to anything and everything? How many a times have you hurriedly taken a picture of a the fire-tailed Myzornis while touring Zuluk and then went back every now and then to count the likes, while a Paradise flycatcher remain unnoticed…..hasn’t the world around you is completely different than the one you grew up watching? While we may look elsewhere in denial mode, the fact remains that we all are characters in a riveting love story with the Facebook.

Did the founder (of Facebook) ever foresee this madness(read lunacy)? Did he ever thought how a pastime of his would mean scanning wi-fi password each time we check-in to the hotel? How it will mean having an ‘account’ before any bank come hounding? How ‘like’ do not transcend to love always? How ‘Wall’ and Rahul Dravid can also mean chalk and cheese!

Facebook, which was initially known as Facemash began its journey in 2003, (an online service for students) being the brainchild of few students of Harvard, spear headed by Mark Zuckerberg. The baby steps did not last longer than 48 hours as it violated university policies and has to be taken off. However in that limited existence, it clinched 450 followers! The initial response, made Zuckerberg register his URL as TheFacebook.com in Jan 2004 which became a social network by the following month! Though initially meant for captive use of Harvard students, its popularity trespassed the corridors of Harvard and invaded the campuses of other universities like Yale and Stanford. The ever innovative founder, introduced the Wall in Sept 2004 and by 2005 (by then it was known as only ‘Facebook’ from ‘The Facebook’) it spread like wild fire as the idea of ‘tagging’ emerged! And in 2006, Facebook opened its gates (beyond students) to anyone and everyone above the age of 13. And there was no looking back since. In India alone, we have 340 million facebook users making it the leading country in terms of FB audience size. For the sake of understanding the enormity of the size, 340 million users in India would rank third in terms of largest population worldwide!  FB users, on an average, login to facebook, eight times a day, normally the same number of times, an office going Babu takes tea break! What divine coincidence!

We as Indians, never comfortable to let go any opportunity (more so, if it comes ‘free’), use it from breakfast to dinner. As a ritual we take 2 teaspoonful of Facebook empty stomach at the start of the day, followed by a handful during lunch and later gulp it down with a glass of water before calling it a day!

Whether it is a new tulip coming up in the garden, a pet eating biscuits, Mousa ji seating in a bus, Dadaji pretending to read an English novel or aunty wearing a (Halter) frock for the first time, the public announcement(breaking news, as they say) always happens in a facebook. Its daily remembrance will ensure you never miss any birthday and what better place to wish than this platform itself.You may call to wish, but unless you register it in FB it may not be‘counted’. So a hapless husband has to wish his wife for her birthday and a helpless subordinate ensures a roaring wish for his boss (louder than anyone else)- all in facebook.

And those likes! Twenty seven selfies of sister in law (all appear same, but then who is going to say!), thirteen photographs of a faraway mountain (hardly visible) clicked by friend’s Ex (for whom you were the jilted postman), one hundred fifty two pictures of the sea with different angles but clicked by your company CEO, all deserves an immediate ‘like’! And to top it, a small crisp comment like,’ wow’ ‘killer’ or ‘can’t take my eyes off’ will only add more points to your social standing. For some, this would also guarantee a return ‘like’ and a ‘comment’ when you post those pics of yours which a week later you feel like deleting and repent to have ever posted!

Facebook is also a tool for a year long PMS (Performance Monitoring System)! So, if wifey’s distant uncle Srivastava has checked in to ‘Taj Bengal’ for that anniversary dinner, or ‘promotion threat’ Chaturvedi is celebrating his birthday bash of turning bald at a picturesque resort or brother in law is at a vacation to Sri Lanka, you know you have a lot of catching up to do! So it is no wonder that we quickly update status as ‘eating dinner, feeling blessed’ in that fancy restaurant even before we get a table or get ‘checked in to airport’ before our luggage are offloaded from the cabs or ‘watching a movie’ as you wait outside the cineplex for the gates to open ! The ecstatic you is crestfallen when the same do not generate desired appreciations from the FB traffic as you go back to your post over and over to check the response and find only 3 likes (including the office boy and the kirana shop owner whom you owe the last month’s grocery bill) . You curse the world for being so uncivilised! Isn’t it the same you who generously commented reading the first line of the 500 worded status or liked the picture which never downloaded! ‘Am I living to see this day’ is the normal question that pops inside you but the brave face outside gives no hints to the turmoil inside. However the positive angle to this is also no less. Now it is so easy to know where your hubby is stuck (‘meeting Reema after 12 years’!), why maid’s fever is not coming down (‘feeling hot at Digha’), how is friend doing at the hospital (‘nurses are being so kind…will miss each of you’), how son is doing at hostel (‘night out with Shalini and 13 others’) or how you, yourself feeling right now (‘feeling cool today’)!

Facebook has really changed the world. It will not be fair to be judgemental of the goods and bad that has come with it. To each his own. However it is hard to ignore the strong impact it has made on each of our lives. Who can, but only Facebook through its algorithm will tell you how you were a Chimpanzee in your last birth,how you will die slipping off banana peel next life (such is the impact that you forgo banana this life too!) and how much wealth you will leave behind (vis-a-vis the minimum payments you make on credit card bills!). It can also predict five hidden traits about you which will surprise your wife or swell your chest with pride when it prophesies the next holiday destination to be South Island in faraway New Zealand instead of Mandarmani, where every wave knows you by now! And then, it is the same platform where an ‘Amen’ may mean a complete debt free life in 24 hours! All happens here.

So, its only in facebook, that I get to hear the passing away of long lost characters who were an integral part of our lives at some point. We write a customary RIP (Rest in peace, takes a long time to write, so,’ Om Shanti’ is gaining grounds) and scroll down. We often visit those profiles, which has been in eternal freeze as no post will ever come up anew. We pause a little and then get back to ‘Home’ with a pretension of all being well. Couple of days back, out of nowhere, I received a terrible news of a colleague passing away, un announced. Flabbergasted by the news, I immediately shared the same through messenger to another person who was very close to the same colleague. When there was no reply back from him, who otherwise is known to revert in nano seconds, I checked his ‘Wall’ to learn he himself has passed away couple of months back! So, I was actually passing a death news to someone who himself is no more.

In the same vein, how each day so many face book users leave the space, unnoticed, like stars falling off the sky. Life goes on. And some day, in the early hours, facebook throws a memory of bygone days, which presses the pause button in us. We stumble, reminisce and move on. Among the cacophony of Facebook walls, as we walk down past the last (check)post, and few hundreds of friends in an otherwise laundry list fades away as time marches on, somewhere it hints at an ever increasing vacuum in our lives which perhaps justifies the crowd we see in the facebook timeline. Each longing for a company, each looking for some attention.

Silence reverberates.

But then the wise always said, if it is free, you are the product.

NB: As I post this,’Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced the parent company’s name is being changed to “Meta” to represent a future beyond just its troubled social network.
The name change comes as the company battles criticisms from lawmakers and regulators over its market power, its algorithmic decisions and the policing of abuses on its platforms’. Source: TOI,Oct,29

Image: From Internet