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