First of all, this post is not about demonization of social media ( and if somehow I manage to do that, it would be due to the strained relationship I have with the medium).
Some days back I opened Facebook to see that one of my friends had posted on his wall that 'he won't be able to come to my marriage' due to some reason best known to him. I didn't cared much about whether he comes to my marriage or not but what rattled me was the fact that he had my phone number, he could have called, texted or wattsapped me. But no, he chose 'posting on his wall' as the best option. Why didn't he printed out a hoarding and put it on his house wall is out of my wit.
In an another incident, someone close to me shared my photo on Facebook without asking me. Well, who cares for others privacy.
In one more and an unprecedented incident, one of my friend wished me birthday on Twitter. Though, he had wished me earlier on the phone, but despite that it really amazed me that he chose a series of tweets to let me know how important I'm to him. Though I appreciate the fact that he seized the opportunity to let me know how important I'm to him, what startled me was the choice of medium because he has sent me these personally curated messages in the past as well but somehow this time the feeling was lost in the breaks between those messages of 140 characters.
These incidents made me think why's this urge to broadcast. I mean, when we have someone's number and have this option to communicate with them individually, why we choose the social media instead?
What goes in our mind when we decide to communicate through social media rather than communicating individually?
It's like going to someone's birthday party or wedding and instead of wishing or greeting them personally, we choose to wish them on loudspeaker, and it can be okay if once in a while someone choose to do so(to make the occasion special) but what if every body start to greet only through loudspeaker?
Now, what could be the reason behind all this. I'm no social scientist(and don't have any motive to look like an intellectual either), so I won't indulge myself into social pondering, and having said that I personally think there are many factors behind this behavior.
First being is 'we care'. We greet on social media to make the day special for other person and to show the 'world' that we care for that person. It's our way of telling the 'world' that we care for that person. It's the most honest factor I can think of.
Now, the second factor is 'Me'. While the first factor was more about 'us', this is all about 'Me'. There are many people out there who greets people on social media not because they care for them, but just for the sake of it. They wish every other person. They don't feel anything. For them, Greeting someone is just like any other activity on social media akin to sharing or liking a photo or video. It's leisure activity for them, void of any emotions. They have your phone number, they could have called you, messaged you but for them, You're nothing more than a social media entity.
Third factor is 'expressing our self'. We choose to broadcast because we want to express ourselves. We seek attention, admiration and validation from random people on the internet and in that pursue we post messages on social media for other person without caring about whether they'll even get it and even if they get it, will they be able to get the feeling you wanted to convey. Whatever the message we are trying to convey, I think that a message that we definitely convey is that 'we care for our self more' than the other person.
I think there is a soul and essence attached with every message and when we broadcast the message, that essence gets distributed and i feel that somehow it fails to evoke the emotion which it would have evoked had it been sent individually. On the other hand when we decide to broadcast a message instead of sending it individually, we trade off the intimacy of the message for want of attention on the social media. By broadcasting, we unconsciously acknowledge that there isn't any confidentiality and intimacy in our relationships.
This constant urge of Broadcasting the personal messages is decreasing the intensity of the personal communication and deliquescing the relationships and to save the intimacy and intensity of relationships, we must revert to the one to one communication.
