The Urge of Broadcasting in personal Communication

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.

A Death is a Death

Once I read a quote somewhere that “if one man dies it’s sad, but if many die it’s statistics”...I appreciated its humour and sarcasm but after watching few days live of Loksabha, I can guess that writer must have been a politician to see humour in someone’s death..

 

Statistics is such a beauty in itself...it was invented to represent facts in efficient and grasping manner but certainly in recent time it has been used as a tool to hide or malign the facts and to disguise or confuse the common man...our “prime minister” and “finance minister” often boast about “growth rate” and “inflation rate” etc.. but the fact is we come from a developing country where 41% of  the total population is still living under poverty line and which is far from being called developed and in a traditional country like ours , a common man always connects the “inflation” to the prices of the domestic items and I don’t understand why govt can’t understand this..People dying out of starvation and politicians are saying mobile, computer and laptop prices are decreasing...and it’s not like that they don’t understand the seriousness of the situation, otherwise they didn’t increase their salaries from Rs.40,000 to Rs.1,20,000, which is three fold..but instead of doing something for them politicians always throw some statistical figures about growth rate and india shining to justify those deaths..

Anyone in this country who is earning less than Rs.560 and Rs. 368 per month in urban and rural areas respectively is below poverty line, which I suggest should be called deadline because anyone’s earning less than that will die in present scenario...and in calculating the poverty line govt. only consider the money needed to acquire sufficient calories to survive..according to them a person only need food to survive, no clothes, no house and no money to cure slightest of his illness...no wonder thousands of people die in every season in this country (be it by heat strokes or in winters due to extreme cold) in lack of any shelter over their head and lakhs die every year in lack of medical treatment...we often read about them in newspapers but they just seem statistical figures to us..

Likewise Indian railways have a long history of accidents and instead of doing something about it, our “railway minister” replied that “no. of accidents in this country are still less than many countries in Europe(another statistical representation)...”...and one should ask him that are we in a competition here? and In similar incident after one of many terrorist attacks(now a days as frequent as festivals..!!) in Mumbai, 1 minister responded  “these sort of small things are bound to happen in big cities like Mumbai..”..These 2 examples shows that when 1 child “prince” falls in boring hole (I hope you all remember that incident...what a national calamity that was..!!!) whole country pray for him and even politicians went there on site but when it comes to number of people died or about to die in bulk it means nothing more than a statistical figure to most of us..And politicians also do nothing except making excuses and presenting more statistical figure to confuse us.

Be it the case of people dying out of starvation, in railway accidents, in Gujarat riots or in terrorist attacks, our politicians need to understand that these are “people” who are dying not some “statistical figures” and after all “A DEATH IS A DEATH NOTHING LESS”..

Brand culture vs Common man

Recently I visited a mall in Noida and felt quite relaxed in cool aura and thanked the mall culture a million times for this liberty but as soon as I left the mall, reality struck me harder and I came to realize how hallucinated and vacuous the mall culture is when I saw the thousands of common man working in extreme heat..

Some time back I saw my friend wearing a goggle of Rs. 2400/-(only...lol) of a prestigious foreign brand and thought how worthless and selfish it is to behave in this manner in a country where our basic requirements are still not accomplished and millions of people are living  below poverty line..

Now days we have a tendency of going to the mall, buying expensive foreign brands and giving them our hard earned money as a gift while we bargain with local shopkeeper even for a rupee who toils hard in extreme heat...go for the lunch in Mcdee worth Rs.200 and fight with rikshawalah for Rs.5 to get there...

One thing I can assure you that this mall and brand culture is nothing more than a mirage created by some highly selfish industrialists and our govt to wrap the poor reality in rich and glazed enfold...  I can guarantee you that our country not going to progress and even our standard of life not going to lift unless and until our money will not reach to the pocket of common men..This money will help them to educate their children, to get adequate nutrition, to get a safe and comfortable place to live, to make them more satisfied and less frustrated with themselves and that will definitely serve our cause...

Whenever u feel urge of cold drink, go for lemon juice, lassi, mango shake etc. Instead of coke, pepsi...just go to local market to buy anything that suits you...go for Indian products as much as possible...and the least we can do is to treat our common men “the unsung hero of our country” which includes farmers, workers, rikshawallahs, dhabawallahs, local shopkeeper, smaller scale industrialists well, to make them feel that they are also the part of the process and they are playing a part in this society which is far more important than it seems..

Although it’s tough to abandon the foreign and expensive brands at once but at least we should make a choice where domestic alternative is available and for God’s sake they are just brands they are not God, we can live without them or we can create some of our own(after all India is the country of entrepreneurs) and we(the youth) should find ways to create more jobs and every possible way to make their life better...after all they are the ones providing base to this country and no county can stand tall until its foundation is strong and trustworthy... 

So, next time you’ll meet any one of these, treat them nicely...and take my words they’ll remember you as “special customer” for lifetime...

I’ve been able to write this blog just because of my very true friend Vivek...most genuine and patriotic of all my friend...always talks and think about country and it’s truly a privilege to have someone like him around me...