New years come and new years go. So has 2012 arrived knowing very well that it would be exactly 366 days before the world rings it out and rolls out the red carpet for the ensuing year. It is so much like all the adulation and celebration that happens during the welcoming of a new bride. It lasts only until another one arrives in the family.There's place only for one under the spotlight.
New year and resolutions are married eternally. And on top of the list for me this year is to spend less time on Facebook and more on making use of my chic laptop for other useful purposes. Too many updates from people whom you once knew force benign gestures of a thumbs up or a smiley and then you get notified on every single wink or every single smile that someone shares around it. The juvenile behavior of poking or pricking or even slapping someone fails to amuse you after a while. It definitely doesn't evoke the slightest of interest when you are notified about it through a mail and when it shares the same space in your personal mailbox as your credit card statement.If that was not all, naive users like yours truly cannot see the beauty or the user-friendliness of a completely revamped interface especially when you have to go around hovering your mouse over every single icon and piece of text to figure out a way to log off.
Facebook suddenly seems to have become a way of life. It has become the easiest means to snoop around. And if someone's name search ended on a "No matches found" note then the person seems to be oddly anachronic in this era of being. Funnily enough, those are the people I have begun to garner respect for. They have given way to more honest relations and communication over a few thousand "friends" and silly comments. This bandwagon will not die soon. And when it does, trust me we would have a lot of litter on our wall and would have been poked to death.
Another thing I hate about this place is how perfectly it ruins your birthday... first it notifies people about you coming into existence on this planet this very day (that's the only rule for a birthday wish - that you must remember it on your own!), then it allows them to wish you without the slightest trouble by just hovering their mouse not more than an inch, and then it neatly groups and places all your birthday wishes and voila! you are plagued with monotonic birthday wishes. What's worse I have seen automated wishes going out too.
Those grotesque & gory images of malnourished and diseased babies, birds and animals alike in the name of spreading a word and awareness, only makes you turn away from these like a beggar at a traffic signal. You doubt the authenticity of such cases and every time you see someone share such stuff you wonder are we helping promote this violence. It's the same thought that crosses the minds of many when they drop a penny in the bowl of a beggar.
We were made to believe that it's best to not wash your dirty linen in public. Facebook made us change our beliefs. Tell me once when you haven't wondered why has this been posted here? And these are the same people you grew up with, in school, in college, or even at work. There used to be a bold black line between public and private. Now there's none. Everything is on Facebook. It's the complex cocktail of these two lives that gives many a high which they've always craved for. Honeymoon pictures, baby delivery pictures, you can only guess what's next! Not to mention those numerous updates of profile pictures revealing the narcissist side even of people who are not even close to the P of photogenic. What's surprising is that most of these pictures are so damn posed and so often too bold for the comfort of anyone that it leads to a bigger or may I say a deeper question - what just bit this guy? The answer - Facebook.
Adieu to the madness of Facebook. Thank you all who "liked" me, to those who jokingly "poked" me, and to those who lent me a "smiley". To those who stagged, gossiped and contributed to the filth - you were never on the friends list!