The moment you read a heading like this, you probably think the Net Neutrality (see my articles on the topic) has lost, or Facebook has signed some new deal, or invested in groundbreaking tech. It could be all of this, and I’d be happy if it were. But this article is – somewhat belatedly – a celebration of something entirely different. This time, I’ll celebrate the victory of Facebook’s purpose, and a lot more.
Let’s go back to when it all began. 2005 was it ? 2007 ? Somewhere around that time. Remember hi5 ? Remember Orkut ? And then we all came to Facebook.
Pourquoi ?
Well, ostensibly so we could all connect on social media. That was a big word, and a tad unnecessary at the time. I mean, we had phones and SMS and email right? And early Facebook was too rudimentary to be something really revolutionary right ? Right ?
Looking back, it was, but we still climbed the bandwagon. We sought out friends who had already joined, and asked others to join, and still others. Then when we felt enough people weren’t around in the chat, or posting updates, we added more people. People we didn’t know, we didn’t care about and frankly, people we only wanted to like our stuff.
This serve the purpose of social media – connecting people remotely in a manner as close to real life as possible. Numerous memes have been made about how acting like we do on Facebook would land us in real trouble in real life, but it’s hard to deny that we have turned Facebook into a second life. (which reminds me, what became of Second Life, the social game ?)
How so ? For beginners, we met friends and talked with them, as we do in real life. Then we added people we didn’t know, as we would in real life. We were circumspect, wondering what sort of people they would be. Some turned out to be idiots (or creeps, or jerks, or sickos, or perverts, if girls were involved) but others became friends. This was like going to a party and meeting new people. Except that every moment was a party, and we already knew something about each person we met courtesy the About section.
So that’s what it became, a place to meet and greet, chat and chatter, snarl and snooze. Maybe not snooze, though I distinctly remember the “moon” icon next to people’s chat icons. Maybe also not meet, because many a times we never met the people who we met regularly online. Maybe nothing, but in the end, we got to “know” a lot more people. Once we knew them, we learned some of them were fake, while others were simply out there to get something out of us. The filtering went on, and we found “true” friends. Sort of, kind of…..
But was it all ? Yes, it was. What did we do beyond clicking photos and uploading them, sending texts and pokes, playing games and sending requests and generally making asses of ourselves ? Did we realize that there could be more to it ? Nope, we did not. It would always remain a place to chat with friends, an auxiliary to our physical existence.
Saying all that has changed would be a massive understatement. Perhaps we could say that our physical existence has become an auxiliary to our Facebook life. But that would truly be hyperbole. So what do we say ?
First, we could say that Facebook has become a place where you could meet a range of people with specific political and social ideas. So Facebook has become not just a place to meet people, but to meet ideas. You could say that was always the case, but the quality and depth of the ideas has changed. As more and more intellectuals and radicals join the platform, debates arise which earlier would never have taken place. Sifting through my old posts, I’m surprised to find how, even when I was an active student activist, I seldom made political statements on Facebook. Reason is, there was very little debate.
Nowadays however, everything that happens anywhere is instantly put before us in the most strongly worded – and sometimes – well-considered manner possible. Every medium of communication, be it TV, newspaper or even the streets themselves, have an echo on Facebook. It is impossible to escape, and why should you ? Isn’t interaction with ideas and politics a facet of the political animal ? Now the political animal has gone on the WWW and the result is a devastating amount of information, ideas and debates.
Second, and related to the first, is the ability of everyone to have an impact. Pretty girls post selfies and they garner thousands of likes, which spurs them to create entire quasi-communities of admirers. That’s impact for you. Err, no, that’s not it.
Impact can be seen when small issues, otherwise buried in half inch articles, become posts in their own right. Someone is suffering from cancer and needs funds. Why would a newspaper or channel cover him/her ? But a facebook post manages that and hopefully, funds do turn up. The funny part is that most of these small issues are brought up by people who we don’t know. Some are friends of friends while others are individuals we “follow”. Or pages we “like”. Through these, we are exposed to a far wider range of facts and information that we could ever have if we’d confined ourselves to friends on facebook. Real life friends that is.
Third, rather amusingly, Facebook friendships have come to reflect real life friendships. You could always defriend (a new word, mind you) someone for hurting your feelings. But what about political opinions ? What if you don’t want to hear what you consider to be leftist or rightist or something-ist hogwash ? Unfriend (another new word!!) immediately. If needed, block him/her. This would be the equivalent of refusing to talk to someone you meet on the street because of “differences”. Some may say it is childish, others may say it is one’s freedom to meet or refuse to do so. Whatever it is, Facebook has now taken on another aspect of our real lives.
Fourth, and rather regrettably, we are entering the era of the online hujuk and keccha. Remember a certain Hutom writing in the 19th Century ? back then, due to poor literacy, the ordinary folk believes whatever was told to them. Nowadays, if we hear anything on the street, we’re likely to Google it. Read it in a nicely worded and colourful post, and you believe it. Stupid claims, like India’s national anthem being called the best anthem in the world, are examples of hujuk. The Delhi case in which a girl claimed to have been threatened (only to be found with AAP political motives later) is an example of keccha.
Fifth, we have become expert stalkers. At least us guys. Clicking photos of girls in public (or private I guess) without permission is an offence. Following a girl to know her whereabouts is an offence too. Making lewd gestures at her is an offence too. Theoretically, all of these are probably offences in the cyber world under the Indian Information Act I guess. In reality, who’s stopping you from hitting “See Full Size” (oh the innuendo!) beneath a girl’s photo, photoshopping it, “following” her to see all her public posts and then sending all sorts of crap stuff to her.
This has caused a lot of trouble for girls, and guys. For girls, the trouble is twofold. First, as barriers of communication break down and we add people outside our social circles (and classes) to get more likes, we end up adding people with mentalities that are very different. The crasser among them end up sending what would be classed as positively obscene comments to girls after “falling in love” with them. What follows is a lot of howling and growling and blocking. But does police complaint follow ? We are all safe behind computers right, so why complain? And obviously, it’s the girl’s fault she put up the picture which led to the comment in the first place. So much like society itself, no ?
The second problem is that there are some smooth movers and shakers. These guys, whom the girl would probably avoid if she could see them in public from the very beginning, create false identities, luring them into meeting them. The rest, as they say, is criminal history.
But guys have trouble too. Trust me, there are sad and honest guys out there who spend a substantial amount of time poring over a variety of girls’ DPs (variety referring to both DPs and girls) and occasionally, masturbating over them. They want to establish friendly relations, and see if any of them go to the point of a relationship. But hey, how do you know a pervert from a genuine friendly guy (even if he is secretly perverted) ? About sections are becoming increasingly blank, friend lists and relationship staii are disappearing from public view and so are, of course, the bread and butter of the frustrated youth – girls’ selfies. One part of mankind is pushing entire man-kind towards doom. Just like real life.
But while we cry over blank About sections, people who have unfriended us and growl over differences of opinion (and all the while ogle at the selfies we do get and the gobble the “information” and the information we get), let us sit back and wonder how far Facebook has become a copy of real life. In lines and lines of code, which none of us will ever bother to fish out and study, we have thrown in our emotions, our life’s memories, our hopes and dreams and all the communications that hold up the tapestry of life. In doing so, we have, feature at a time, made Facebook a home we can never leave without serious withdrawal symptoms.
Here, and only here, do we feel part of our friend circle, ideological circle, pervert circle and along with these, the circle of like-minded and opposite-minded people across the world, regardless of where we are. In this sense, Facebook has succeeded in its mission of bringing friends – in the real and the broader, global sense, together. And it has succeeded in creating a world that is so much richer than anything we can have at any one moment, at least in terms of sheer information. It has created attitudes and tendencies that mimic real life with real life consequences. And it has created a generation that truly holds facebook above a lot in life. For better or worse, facebook has achieved a lot more that it – or we – ever imagined.