(Un)social Media

Last week a news on The Times of India caught my attention. A 25-year old woman committed suicide after changing her profile  picture to an illustrated "I hate my life". Incidentally, her mother was among the few friends who liked the post! As I typed "Suicide Video", Google was efficient enough to fill it up with "...on YouTube" and the first page was populated with a couple of videos.

Our day begins with social media and ends with one! And as we get more accustomed to using these media, I should better modify this phase with "our lives begin with a photo on Facebook and ends with a post in it"!

But not everyone is on the same boat, as expected. There are people who, given a chance, would post their location even when they enter the washroom, and there are people who would not post even when the world is eager to know about them. So, what makes a person addicted to a social media? Why will someone share each and every detail, even though that may harm them? [Do you remember the story of Kerala prisoners, accused of political murder, who posted photos taken in jail on Facebook"? :-) ]

A Harvard study found that people like to talk about themselves, and the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same part of the brain that is associated with the sensation of pleasure, the same pleasure that we get from eating food, getting money or even having sex. That reminds me of an internet joke I found some time back, which claimed that sex is just like oxygen; you don't feel its importance until you are not having any! Perhaps going by the same logic, another study done by a German university found that lonelier people more probable to get addicted to Facebook.

One more study done on 425 students in Utah Valley University found that the more hours people spent on Facebook, the more they thought that life is unfair to them. It has been argued that Facebook-related dissatisfaction is the result of a common psychological process known as 'correspondence bias', in which people draw false conclusions about others based on limited knowledge. Another research done on 600 adults in Germany found that one-third of those Facebook users mostly felt frustration emanating from envy. The scientists also pointed that this leads  to a dangerous self-promotion-envy spiral in which users who feel envious of their social media friends boost up their own profiles in response, leading to a vicious cycle, in which “the envy-ridden character of the platform climate can become even more pronounced.”

If the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had the time to go through this blog till now, perhaps he would have jumped with joy, as he is the one who (in)famously said, "To me, social media is the worst menace to society." Our very own home minister Sushil Shinde would probably have another reason to show his courage to crush social media!

But probably they are yet to understand that this is the age of digital natives, a term famously coined by Merc Prensky. The present generation eats digital, drinks digital and thinks digital! Now is the time for a tremendous change, captained by the digital natives and probably followed by some digital immigrants. It is a pleasure to find one such immigrant in Pope Francis, who stated without any hesitation "The Internet...offers immense possibilities for encounter and solidarity. This is something truly good, a gift from God."

Social Media may have drawbacks, but even the best medicine will also have some side-effects! If you know how to use it for your benefit, you will probably see more profit in it. It is the user who makes the media social or unsocial, and not the media itself!

[N.B. This logic also defends me in case anyone is inspired to commit suicide after reading the first paragraph of this article; I am not to be blamed!! :-) ]

[This post was originally made in my WordPress blog on 21 Mar 2014. You can see the same here.]