Social Networking or Social Not-working?

With the advent of social networking sites such as Facebook, WeChat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram to name a few, life has been more easy and fast, comfortable and short in terms of communication and business.

Facebook which has grown so widely in Bhutan for instance has almost supplanted the communication alternatives that we have at our disposal, and for many of us, it has been more than a substitute to social media itself. In the same vein, WeChat, a Chinese social media application is yet another persuasive social media limb that has strongly grown roots in our social network system due to its facility to communicate and distribute images and videos at a lightning speed even under an umbrella of a low network receptivity.  

In the dawn of such social media, life has been pretty cheap and easy to re-connect with the long lost elementary or high school friends, relatives or even those people whom we met briefly, somewhere sometime. It is even more fascinating to find people having the same species of interest, thereby creating a niche for easy transmission of the information at a relatively higher speed. What one knows can also be scattered to the rest simply by sharing or tagging friends. In this way, the cyclone of the newsfeed cycle or any human affairs becomes supersonic fast. Thanks to social media for this Social Networking mystic.

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However, as much as it is comfortable to repose our life on a carpet of such social media, like the emergence of any technological contraptions, of late, it has reportedly generated some potential downsides.  

While many of us understand that social media guarantees a free space for ourselves to post anything, we ignore to realize that the post we post is porous and electronically transparent. Due to this ignorance (or for some due to frustrations), the walls of our account apparently becomes more than a graffiti of emotions churned out based on the heartbeat of our mood-meter. 

At times, when despicable feelings about our life, workplace, boss, employer or friendship are scribbled - though merely in a form of words - we become vulnerable and susceptible to societal threats, official predators, and occupational hazards. Even if it doesn’t invite severe consequences, due to the leakage of such private feelings, the least it can do is stonewall the intimacy and jeopardize the social web settings. The tremor caused due to such action is so strong that once the nest of our relationship is disturbed, an inerasable aftermath and tsunami of suspicions and hatred is bred, thereby making Social Not-Working. In other words, the very purpose of social networking remains futile and turns out to be the battlefield of abuses, fear, prejudices, suspicions or disparaging. Under such circumstances, social networking turns out to be social Not-working.

However, while many might argue with our own reasons of pros and cons, the bottom line is that social media itself is not good or bad. It depends on how it is used and with whom we use it.

“We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is, how well we do it”- Erik Qualman

Hero Worship

With the evolution of time, hero-worshipping has evolved into a different horizon of human perspectives and understanding.

History has, a long time ago, taught us that during the ancient civilizations, the entire nation would not only celebrate the ‘heroic’ deeds of their emperors in rescuing the kingdom from an invasion but would also strongly idolize them for their chivalrous bravery. A person who would salvage the peace by sacrificing their life would be dubbed ‘superstar’ for the endowment of a nonhuman supernatural power and noble qualities.     

 

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But today, the DNA of such idolatry has turned flaccid and to a certain degree, it has already suffered an epidemic of extinction from a chromosome of human knowledge and interpretation. Due to such erosion and corrosion of human definition, a sea of change has impacted the lives of our children, when it comes to ‘hero worshipping’.     

Like many of us, rarely does our children hero-worship our ancient freedom fighters or the nation builders although the heroes of history are infinite and incalculable.  

Sadly, for the people of this generation when it comes to hero-worshipping, our adrenalin wouldn’t hesitate to cry out the names of celebrities, sports and TV personalities, models, wrestlers or anyone who has acclaimed superstardom of any sort. In anyways, we admire these people for their success or seemed-to-be fascinating outshine.

But at times, that subtle filament of our human ego tends to get hurt and suffer mental bruises when our so-called idols fail to magic us to a purview of our expectations and designs. That’s when I hear my colleagues regretting watching an English Premier League or LaLiga because their soccer ‘hero’ suffered a miscarriage in doing a hat trick. That’s also when I debated with my colleague about an acclaimed superstar whose movie flopped to churn out a huge collection at the box office.     

 

While a myriad of studies on hero worship and idolatry have been already conducted in many advanced nations, its bearings on our survivals are either viewed as negligible or ignorant. In fact, psychology is much against that ritual of pervasive celebrity worship for varied reasons-both scientific and empirical. It has been regarded that celebrity worship even purely for an entertainment purpose probably reveal an extraverted personality (interest outside the self) which is though deemed healthy and harmless to one’s behaviour. 

However, the one involving intense personal attitudes and admiration is regarded to show the characteristics of neuroticism (a mild psychiatric disorder). And the worst of all, the most extreme worship denotes borderline pathological behaviour and exhibit psychoticism.

“Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry” – Swami Vivekananda