Facebook Mania

Mania: n: An excessively intense enthusiasm, interest, or desire; a craze

Nothing has touched the lives of the internet users across the globe like Facebook has. With over 500 million users, it is easily the most popular social net-working site ever. So, love it or hate it, you cannot ignore it.  People of all ages are now hooked, and though the official age for being on FB is 13, I have seen 5 year olds updating their statuses with innocent mirth. My own daughter has an account since she was 11 years old (she’s 13 and a half now). I had shown her the relevant ‘Terms and conditions’ page, but it didn’t take long for her to discover that all she needed to do was tweak her DOB just a bit to take the plunge. Recently there was news of a group of pregnant women opening accounts for their unborn babies! They even made their fetuses have mock chats with each other online! -I’m kicking now, I'm somersaulting. God!

Like everything else, FB has its advantages and disadvantages. In real life, we all have passed through time-zones- Early and late childhoods, adolescence, youth and adulthood. We all had friends in each stage of life. Growing up, we separated from the old friends and made new ones, seldom remembering the oldest ones, often forgetting what they looked like. Before FB, most of us had a ‘current’ group of friends, and probably had been in touch with people who crossed us within the last five years or so, through as much as annual phone calls. Then, came Facebook- Bang! We started re-connecting with our oldest friends, dating back to even the kindergarten! The thrill of discovering long-lost friends from two, three decades ago, and sharing with them old sepia photographs; enquiring upon parents, siblings and teachers; reminiscing first crushes and dates was unmatched. Suddenly FB made us board a time machine and fly back to those times! Such virtual reunions re-kindled old-times’ emotions and prompted scores of people across the world to arrange physical re-unions. Apart from old friends, has FB allowed us to make new friends sharing common likes and dislikes.

It is not that only those people, who are thousands of miles apart, and belonging to the older times, connect through FB. Even people concurrently living in the same city, area and street prefer connecting through the FB!  Spouses talk with each other on FB, wishing each on their birthdays and anniversaries!  Children extort new gadgets from their parents- My dad is giving me a new I-phone on my birthday! Yippee!  Yippee, my foot.

Log in any time of the day and you’ll find a variety of status updates- happy and somber; romantic and poetic; angry and frustrated; bored; thrilled; tired and pissed-out etc. People also make all kinds of announcements on FB- A new car, a new house, a new kid, and perhaps a new wife, career achievements, children doing well in exams, or a recent holiday- garnished with carefully chosen and photoshopped snaps from the trip. In short, FB is about everything- one can chat with someone across the street, or across the seven seas- dressed in as much as a pair of pyjamas! No hassle of dressing up and becoming presentable! And no matter how you actually look like, you’re free to choose your best picture from ten years ago and use it as a profile picture. It is easy to display talent- art, poetry (original and plagiarized), photographs, or simply tell jokes- FB is a ‘everything-goes’ or ‘do-your-stuff’ kind of site.

FB is also a number one gossip site. Check other people’s statuses and put a comment or two; update your own status and see what others have to say about it; ‘like’ a comment, laugh at others and scoff at some… keep a tab on everything around the world all at your convenience.

Like all things with advantages, FB has loads of disadvantages as well. Foremost disadvantage is addiction. If not checked in time, FB can become as addictive as marijuana, if not more. Recently, perhaps sensing such malady afflicting him, a friend of mine on FB declared that he was tired of logging in and out, checking statuses and comments, and had decided to say good-bye to FB for ‘a good 6-7 months’. There were congratulatory messages for him for his brave attempt, some were sad that he was leaving the scene. Others, like me kept quiet, because we knew that he would come back much earlier than the ‘6-7 months’. And indeed, he did come back- in just 2 weeks, announcing his return with much fanfare! Such is the pull of FB…Jaani, yahan log aate apni marzi se hain par jaate hain Mark Zuckerberg ki marzi se!

Another disadvantage is the embarrassment of finding an old flame on facebook, and worse is finding your wife’s old flame on the next page!

On a serious note, the worst disadvantage is perhaps the loss of personal, physical touch in relationships. Now-a-days we seldom call-up friends, meet-up even less. Everyone is online. Have we become data? Thousands of gigabytes of data in form of pictures, videos, text messages and updates? What has the future in store for us? Will we all become humanoid robots similar to the ones shown in the Bruce Willis starrer sci-fi movie ‘Surrogates’, where the real flesh-and-blood humans lead a life of misery, while their surrogates put out a bright but false and deceptive version of themselves to the world? Think. Somehow, I love and hate Mark Zuckerberg at the same time.