"It has sure been a while
Since Loona walked the sand
that she ran a breathtaking mile
Across the Pacific land"
The times when we photographed moments for the sheer pleasure of freezing memories for eternity sounds like ancient history to us. With the advent of Social Networking, the virtual life that many people think they live, have taken over our real lives. The boundary sepearting the two is thinner than a gossamer thread, yet the impact on our lives is huge. The need to tell the world our every move has increased a thousand fold and all of us feel like we are celebrities living a public life. Each one of us know deep within how ridiculously boring and stupid it is to listen to someone saying "Hey all!!! I just kicked a bear in it's shin and drank octopus blood" But suddenly when it is on someone's wall, it receives a hundred likes and a million comments ranging from "LOL!! I almost killed my neighbour's dog laughing" to "You dork!! So you... " . The asinine poster makes it a point to check his noticification every nano second after having congratulated himself to have come up with the best of all wisdom in the world. Seriously where are we headed to?
While our world opens everyday to a dichromatic elctronic page lacking any emotional content, we sit and think our a** off to come up with some gnarled status message which makes sense to a 'esoteric' few while the others, whose curiosity gets the better of them comment vociferously, trying ot find out what the hell you were trying to convey. Status messages have lost their meanings. What are they for? Why on earth are you tempted to think that you ought to answer every single question the site asks you that you end up answering to the "What's on your mind?" question too?? I , personally find that question a little too insulting, for reasons that my kith and kin would know. :P.
One sure thing that the social networking promises to endow upon us is a truckload of awesome photos that we could preserver for a lifetime. You could be sitting next to your grand daughter's boyfriend and you could be seen boasting about your once upon a time profile photo ," Yes Tim, I used to look that pretty and
appealing". The said beautiful and appealing photo must have been a result of a million attempts of a friend and yourself to get the right photo for your profile. While the duo of yours adjusted every facial muscles and tried out every lighting settings and angles, the result was always a 'not at all screwed up ' version of your own sane self. This naturality in the photo result, however was not the one expected of a profile photo ad so the photo session continues. As if, managing the profile photos was not responisiblity enough, we are presented with a whole section for our photos. A few os us tap into our photographic mettle while the rest of us turn into models. O! There is this favourite clan of mine, who think that the next second of the world's existence is at their mercy and if they don't tell the others what they are upto, then world would be swallowed by the coffee monster. Their 'interesting' photos encompasses a whole range of "O this is me When i was getting down the stairs".. "look at me eating a dead cat...Arr!!!".
Videos are one sure shot way of gaining popularity. Post a video of a girl getting killed or a child falling off a cliff and instantly it goes viral. What has happened to the Homo Sapien soul that used to lve within us? There are even guys who have further become popular reviewing these videos. I could go on and on and even ramble an instance or two where the so called humans were seen filming an accident of a dog getting torn to shreds and instead of halting the gruesome cruelty that unfolded in front of their eyes, they just cooly substituted their mental photoreceptor with a video camera.
P.S : I am not totally against Social Networking. Social Networking could churn out to be beneficial on so many levels, if used wisely. But , what can we expect out of the descendats of a woman, who once had trouble resisting the temptation to eat the cursed apple.
P.P.S : Its ironical that this is going to appear on all the social networking community am part of
PPPS (more like a Disclaimer) : To all my facebook and orkut friends; twitter and buzz followers, I love you all . :-)
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