A Guide on How NOT to Use your Social Media!

Last week, a 20 year old young lad from Coimbatore committed suicide because he wasn't able to see Vijay's movie, Thalaiva, on the day of the release. Usually, the death of a person is reason to mourn. But this time, It was more of disgust. Three reasons -

• Why would someone kill themselves over someone who they have no emotional bond with?
• Why would someone kill themselves over something which will constitute just 3 hours of their life?
• Why would someone kill themselves at all?

What was the reason behind the young man taking such a drastic decision over a movie? Was he proving himself to be a “true fan”? Or was he just an idiot?

Nowadays, celebrity fandom is at an unimaginable high . The more one thinks of it, Social Media is the dominant reason for this. How? Let's try to think this out.

The humankind mimics, by nature. We humans subconsciously mimic when we are in a conversation with an individual, especially if they share similar interests. This is done to empathize with the speaker or the social circle or the community at large. What is to be noted is that an individual mimics through social interaction. In today's era, where social media is mightier than a pen or sword, the interaction is significantly more. People follow one another on twitter, actively argue on fan pages on Facebook and more often than not, push oneself over the edge.

10 years ago, when Social Media was in its embryonic stage and Internet was still in making its transition from from Dial-Up to Broadband, social interaction was restricted to one's actual social circle. No, not the Google + circles. People used to discuss on any topic within their circle, and the possibility of the discussion spreading across other similar groups, or going viral, was extremely remote.

Fast forward 10 years, Social Media plays the cruel parasite which has the power to not just spread any discussion to numerous social circles, but to twist, mutate and shape shift in ways the reciever wants to concieve. Chinese whisper on the web, if you may. Celebrities more often than not play the role of an Epiparasite. And we humans, play the hosts to the parasitic ambitions of Social Media. The idea is very similar to that of Meme Theory.

Everytime, a new major movie is up for release we see the twitterati explode with millions of tweets on how the movie is either going to be orgasmically good or it's going to be an insult to the intelligence of the masses. It is perfectly fine for someone to express their opinion on Social Media. But being the parasitic hosts we are, we feed these ideas onto other similar hosts (read retweets, shares, likes etc). Once the parasitic infection reaches a given level where it becomes “cool”, mimicking springs into action. People who may not even be remotely interested in being a part of the menagerie to begin with are sucked into it.

Just as this blog was being written, Sachin Tendulkar tweeted something about his support of the MARD initiative. Fair enough. The disheartening part of all this is the tweets by his so called fans. Tweets like “God is back to twitter”, “I joined twitter only to check Sachin's tweets”, “OMG, Sachin is here. My day has been made” etc were a dime a dozen. The last I checked, there was just 1 tweet supporting the Initiative as compared to 10 random, meaningless tweets? Needless to say, it is quite unnecessary.

The weeks leading upto Chennai Express's release,it was a pain looking at my TL and FB wall. It was either fans going gaga over SRK's brilliance or how it will be the worst movie in the history of the planet. Similar was the case before the release (Or Non-Release) of Thalaiva. There was this one section of Vijay “fans” bickering about how they will watch the movie FDFS and watch it n number of times. When the news of its non-release spread, there were innumerable tweets/posts about how people won't watch any other movie till its release.

The human mind is tweaked in a way that it accepts and processes information that is readily accessible, regardless of its credibility. With a freeflow of not particularly sensible information on Social Media, our minds are subconsciously filled with what we see (Oh, she had this dessert at xyz, it looks so yummy, I wanna eat it too) or what we read (Oh, he is reading the Homer’s Illiad, what a pretentious douche) to what we engage in (Let me spam this page with racial slurs and sit back and enjoy the backlash) . It has come to a point where we fail to distinguish between what to embrace and what to ignore.

Let us not forget that social media is a wonderful tool to stay in touch with people and establish contacts, participate in healthy discussions over controversial matters and receive new perspectives of people whom you might have never even met. All we are saying is that when you post a status asking the 800 friends on your list (quarter of which you don’t know personally) “what should I eat for dinner?”, what makes you think anyone cares. You might argue that people got back to you on that post. Some suggesting what you can eat, others might’ve listed the dishes on their three-course meal and an odd one or two would’ve politely asked you to sod off.

All we are saying here is that use the tools to make something constructive or at least amusing. If you take them and bash them against one another then all you make is noise and that my dear, adds chaos in the cosmos.

PS: Thanks to +Bhavya Sharma for helping me make some sense out of this blog.