Saturday, June 8, 2019

Social Media and Unsocial Behaviour

The term "social media" has become part and parcel of our daily existence in this digital era. Almost, every individual on this planet has used this popular and ever growing medium, in one way or the other.

From India to Iceland, humans have this unsatiable urge and craving to stay "connected" and make themselves visible to the rest of the world.

This is probably one such platform that gives its army of loyal users to express themselves freely (almost)..

The "expressions" can oscillate from absolute non-senses to super valuable gems; however,  the former outnumbers the later.

It is very much unfortunate that this platform is being used more for trolling, threatening, spreading hatred and circulating misinformation.

It is an interesting phenomenon; on one hand, we have coined the term "social media" and consider ourselves truly civilised only when we have social handles but on the other hand,  the behaviour of most of us is thoroughly unsocial, unacceptable and sometimes, criminal.

As individuals, we can express our displeasure against certain events or people but it should be within civilised limits; we simply can't dictate and give verdicts!

Why on earth, should people be so judgemental and critical of actresses and female models,  who update their personal social pages with their photographs wearing bikinis or other skimpy outfits?

Can't the "know it all" junta understand that these ladies are in such a profession,  in which glamour is of top most priority ?

This is hypocrisy; people will visit such pages to satiate their titillation but will comment or behave as if they are the beacons of morality!!

Are we always driven by morality?

These same band of people will issue death threats to others, if they feel that their political ideologies are not acknowledged by others.

These goons will use social platform to send rape threats in the garb of upholding their respective religions, to intimidate people of other faiths. What pious acts!

Another irritating aspect of social media usage is the act of "Sharing".

Social media aficionados are obsessed with sharing whatever they have at their disposal.  So much is the zest and zealousness of sharing that in the name of information,  volumes of absolute trash and fake materials in forms of jpegs/gifs/pdfs/plain texts/audio/video gets circulated every second, across the globe.

People don't even bother to verify the received information.  They will promptly and mechanically download the file and swiftly pass it on to others - as if the whole world is competing in a never ending ,virtual relay race. However,  there are no start and end points.

People happily and merrily circulate videos of beheading of captured victims by radical groups. They take pride in sending videos of family that perished in mass suicide.

The social media platforms are slowly turning into digital trash bins. They are being used more for activities mentioned above and abhorrent tasks like recording one's own suicide.

Have the tech behemoths, unknowingly and unintentionally,  created new age Frankenstiens ? I wonder..