A mother writes, “I am not happy at the way my son stays huddled over Facebook all the time. He’s stuck with it on his phone, on the PC and in his head. He seems to be brooding over it, living in it, sleeping with it. I am totally helpless. What do I do?”
Aha, I was waiting for someone to say this. I am all for deleting the Facebook icon from my desktop and my life. I know it’s easy for me, since I am more of a physical guy who needs to hang out with friends, socialise with them at a club or at home in the real, physical world. I am against hobnobbing on a computer screen in the virtual cyber world. Besides, apart from school and college buddies, I don’t have too many friends, and I know it’s not possible or necessary to make new friends all the time. Sometimes we don’t meet or talk for months, and it’s perfectly okay, because whenever we get together, it’s as if we had never parted. I know that Facebook is a great way to stay connected, but I also realise that it can be downright dangerous and destructive.
Social networking sites have replaced physical togetherness with virtual togetherness. That’s great when friends are scattered worldwide and need to connect. But it’s not so great when they are all part of the same school or gang and meet everyday anyway. You go out with your friends, chill, play, eat, and the moment you leave, you start punching in mindless stuff on everyone’s walls. Why? Where’s the need to comment on every damn thing everyone did, thought and said? Isn’t physical interaction enough?
For millions of kids, Facebook has turned from a social networking site into an unstoppable addiction, where they continuously assault each other’s egos and vice versa — glaring at a tiny LED screen as they search for inane words to punch in surrogate, unfelt feelings. My generation was better off without it. We would physically catch up, gang up together and spend a few hours in boisterous laughter, and then go home and start on homework and stuff. If anybody had a fight or hurt someone’s feelings, he had the rest of the evening to heal, realise his mistake and say sorry the next day. But these days, there is no time for healing or introspection. Facebook ensures that whenever two kids break off or have differences, everyone becomes a party to it. Everyone gloats, chips in with snide remarks, adds salt to festering wounds.
For kids these days, the virtual world can all of a sudden become a hard, merciless place. It’s so strange — this virtual crowd, this virtual company, this virtual everything and real nothing. Facebook can destroy that last refuge they have, the centre of their being, to combat the stress of the outside world.
Here are a few newly discovered Facebook-related diseases and symptoms.
1. Chewing the mental cud syndrome: Happens when kids suddenly switch off from the real world and chew a mental cud like a cow, regurgitate feelings and grope for suitable replies to nasty wall comments in their head.
2. The blank stare syndrome: Here, the kid just stares blankly into outer space like a Greek statue. Of course, he is looking nowhere else but inside his head as sounds and voices of messages fill up his being. This is a virtual version of a virtual programme, a ridiculous situation where the Facebook programme is running in your head without booting up.
3. The bleary-eyed kid syndrome: This is when a kid wakes up in the morning looking like he didn’t sleep at all. In all probability, he had Facebook nightmares, where tonnes of nasty stuff was written on his wall, his girlfriend broke up with him, and he was all wall-broken…heartbroken, I mean.
That’s it. I’ve vented my feelings. Now I’d better hide virtually, shut my email id and escape the wrath (of teenage readers) that is surely coming my way!
The writer is a film director