Social Media Distancing

Disclaimer: This post is not going to be one of those goody good neutral posts that I usually write to avoid any controversy. Some of the opinions I am going to share here might not go well with everyone. You may not like what I have referred as incorrect behavior and that is perfectly fine but still read it with an open mind and be respectful if you defer in opinion for a fruitful discussion ahead.

The fact that I have to write a disclaimer ahead of the post in itself shows what is wrong with current social media and the way people have become on it. Mature discussions are replaced by taunts, jibes and sarcasm; there is hardly any scope left for a good discussion appreciating the difference in the opinion or trying to dig deep why certain opinions have been formed. People have stopped thinking on why others are thinking the way they are and if you think they are not thinking correctly, how to change their thinking rather everything has been limited to insulting adjectives, stereotypes, name calling and demeaning others.

Social Media has become such an integral part of our life now that it is tough to imagine a life without such platforms. Let’s rewind our clock a bit, to a time when there was no social media. Perhaps the mid 2000, I am sure now most will agree that it was a good time. Google was still there, so you can pretty much search out whatever you wanted to know. The main source of your knowledge were still books, print media and electronic media. People were just becoming aware of Wikipedia, answer yahoo was still there as a good alternative. Then came Orkut, our first step into the world of social media.

Then came Facebook and Twitter in late 2000, people started moving away from Orkut quickly. Earlier days of Facebook were still limited to playing games like Farmville, Mafia Wars etc. I was never active on Twitter, not even today, so I have not much idea of how life progressed there. We copied our SMS culture on Facebook, so earlier status were full of small jokes, random copy paste comment competition, tagging people in random pics ( good ice breaker for early college goers to get close to their crushes ), some motivational shit ( we love to do it no matter what platform), so overall nothing very serious was going on there.

The 1^st big social media moment of the country. The Anna Hazare movement. Social Media was suddenly abuzz with intense hatred for the corrupt system. There were big discussions on the current state of country. Everyone started sharing their opinion and it became a large platform for mass discussion. It became common to indulge in a comment war of 100+ comments with a stranger on someone else’s wall or a random page. But still, everyone were relatively were respectful. The focus was on the discussion not on personal jibes and remarks. It used to be a fun time back then, as you could indeed learn a lot from others and discuss respectfully.

Afterwards social media was pretty much involved in many sensitive events. The nirbhaya case, the downfall of UPA government, Middle East wars, major terrorist attacks etc. BJP was little quick to realize the potential of social media and they created a strong army for it, to promote its ideology, to aggregate the dissatisfaction and anger against the policy paralysis and corruption of UPA 2, to connect more with a tech savvy upcoming voter on issues. Just as Nokia failed to see the potential of android, congress missed the early days of connecting to this digital crowd.

I was very active on social media since the early days. I wasted countless precious hours on playing mafia wars and other games. I used it as a writing platform, there was a time when I used to post like 3-4 posts a day. I used to indulge in lots of political discussions. I used to have some extreme views back then which matured up slowly as I travelled to places, talked to people coming from different background and read a lot. But still, it was fun discussing issues in those early days because even when you were sticking to an extreme view, you get to learn a lot in terms of history, facts, information and even behaviour.

I don’t exactly know when it becomes really toxic but perhaps it happened around mid 2010. By then, most political parties have well-structured IT cells and well financed agents to spread their ideologies. Common public is too innocent to see through the information being fed to them. The algorithm is very simple, it shows what you want to see, and once you show inclination towards a particular thought, it will show you so much content around it that your inclination will become an extremely polarized thought, a bias that you won’t be able to get away with, a hardcore ideology that you have become a follower of unintentionally.

It’s hard to identify the truth anymore. The headlines are misleading and the contents are colored. As I write this post, one page is discussing how India triumphed in pressuring China and defended its border while other page is discussing how the present government failed to save our country and China has taken away our land. Both the sides have strong followership with only a few voice of dissent which are crushed with quite cruelty. The scope of discussion is over. You either believe in this or that and any other opinion will be crushed mercilessly.

Similar case is observed on people’s post and statuses. Earlier, there used to be mature discussions even on the comment thread. Now people write with strong conventions, either you believe them or you don’t. Earlier the posts were written with the intention of inviting the dissenting voices to have a good discussion. Now the posts are written for those 5-6 likes and 2-3 comments of admiration from people who believe what you believe. People have teamed up and they bully those who differs. People have stopped commenting because they fear they will be ganged, cyber bullied and virtually harassed. The tags are there to be fired from the launchers. Be it closet Sanghi, chaddi, blind bhakt or liberandu, anti nationalist, fake leftist or whatever, its’ out there, you know who to label what and within the first 1 or 2 comments it will come around. End of discussion, you are sanghi so you think like that or since you have posted this comment you are leftist. Discussion over.

I sometimes wonder whether people can’t see their own hypocrisy or they have just learnt to live with it and ignores it. For example, the practice of selectively ignoring the mistakes of party of your choice and selective opposing the party you hate. People who are anti BJP love to make fun of UP, Gujarat and highlight the bad things happening there and promote Kerala, WB. People who are pro BJP then will counter with the bad things happening in Kerala, WB and overall what you see on your feed is the entire toxic news happening in country with no one discussing the good which a state like Orissa is able to achieve in tough times.

The cost of these tagging and extremism is paid by the neutral person who just wants to speak once in a while. A neutral person doesn’t blindly prefer a government or a person nor does he hate one. He judges by work and that’s where he fails. If you praise current central government for something you think it is good then the very moment all the anti government people will come and bombard you with tags like chaddi, bhakt, uneducated, illatred, messenger of hatred and what not. Similarly, if you oppose the present government you are garlanded with adjectives like anti national, fake hindu, coward etc. Since you don’t follow either the pro or anti-gang, you don’t have any support system that will team up to save or support you, you get beaten by both regularly.

Same goes for issues like feminism, reservation, capitalist model and many other topics. The situation is grim because there is so much information asymmetry. You see sponsored biased pages waiting for a particular event to happen to push their agenda which makes people thoughts extreme. Misleading headings are common because they know how small attention span of people are and how lazy many are to read their content or watch the video they are quoting. Manipulative and selective content to further provoke people has become a norm. Also, there are many content related pages and websites with immature writers who will write 1 thing on one day and totally opposite thing on other day. Because they also know, if they put extreme posts, they will get more likes and comments thus increasing their visibility organically. Hatred has been used quite an effective advertising tools by many pages.

The main problem here is earlier people used to read and then form an opinion. Now people have an opinion and they just post and push their narrative accordingly. An elephant is killed mercilessly by a cracker filled pineapple. Rather than discussing the event and its root cause, everyone starts pushing their own agenda. Kerala haters started belittling and insulting Kerala, vegetarians started highlighting hypocrisy of non-vegetarians, then you have the opposite arguments and in a while everything becomes a huge mess. There are classic example like Rohtak sisters where the social media sensationalism resulted in ruining the life of innocent ones. Social Media has in general its own set of rules for who is the victim and who is the oppressor and without even looking at an event objectively, sentence is announced.

People tend to ignore that there may be good things in life too. Some policeman are bad, they do horrible things. But many are not, many have and are doing good things also. The cruel face of police beating citizens were published and talked far more than the kind face where police helped the migrant workers and nearby villagers. Like the famous dialogue of Rockstar,”negative bikta hai”. Social media pages of popular newspapers and content sites have learnt this quite well that they will get far more reach by publishing negative news than the positive ones.

The fact is most of the problems that are being discussed lately on social media persisted from a long time. It is not like they randomly popped up 2-3 years back. As much as it pains to see the painful events happening around the globe, they were happening since a long time. Writing a post, making your DP black and then moving on won’t change it. Although, I still support your right to feel emotional at times, all of us do, still just limiting your pain to social media is not the kind of behaviour that will change the root cause of the issue.

Also, there is a new trend of calling out the silent ones. There are many who are not as vocal as others on social media. Many people haven’t even put a single post for years. So the new trend of shaming the silent have begun. According to the narrative either you are supporter to dictatorship or a coward Hindu, spineless crowd during a fascism or spineless majority in the era of radicalization. People have already declared that their version, their ideology, what they are thinking is right and those who stay silent are worse than even those who are speaking against. That is funny to me, the bullying has shifted from the opponents to the silent ones also. And again, like the neutral person, the silent ones are getting shamed by both the ends.

One of my friend once said that he doesn’t use social media much because it doesn’t assure everyone has ears but it has given mouth to everyone. So every person is free to speak, free to spread hate, free to fight, free to insult, it has empowered the timid ones to become a vocal troll on this platform. Interestingly, many of my friends have deactivated their social media account. They say they can’t bear the stupidity and toxicity anymore. To me, it is a very extreme step.

I advocate for social media distancing. In a pandemic like corona, you have to stay inside most of the time yet you have to come out once in a while for essential work and take necessary measures. Same goes here, instead of abandoning it completely the better thing will be to follow distancing. You have to take some hard steps, you have to confuse the algorithm to ensure it doesn’t make your thoughts extreme. You have to sensitize your thoughts by cross checking whatever the headings you are reading that is provoking you. You have to stay away from vulnerable areas.

Unlike some pages, unfollow some people even unfriend if you feel so, stay away from discussions where you know there won’t be any output coming, don’t try to pick up unnecessary fights, use it constructively, pick only those sources which helps you, be it only the funny pages or people who posts objective and neutral content. Post your own thoughts and indulge in discussions with only those who are worth investing your time are. There are still many good things happening out because of social media. Issues which might have died out turns a mega news, many needy ones do get help, it even reminds you about the birthdays you would have easily forgotten. I won't have a platform to publish this post if there was no Facebook. I do suggest time to time social media detox to all and then spending some time to fix the sources from which news are coming. There will always be noise in the system, there will always be toxicity, but I believe with some maturity we can still turn this virtual platform into the la la land we came to escape from realities of life rather than another replica of the toxicity we live in.