Sunday 31 October 2010

(UN) Social Networking!

It’s brief news. Avid news lovers too can miss this one! While reaping through the newspaper my eyes stuck onto news‘Mother kills baby for Farmville!’
Anyone familiar with Facebook knows what Farmville is all about! Sometimes I call it ‘plight of an urban farmer!’ Seeding, harvesting, barn raising, building and blah blah blah… All you have to finish within a stipulated time! A young mother from Florida was playing Farmville, her 3-month-old was crying. His crying was so ‘disruptive’ in manner that she shook him vigorously and eventually the baby was dead!
This is not a single incident; many such big & small incidents are taking place in name of social networking!
The idea of social networking lies in connecting people. Orkut set the stage few years back and Facebook made it a ‘status symbol’! There are several other sites like these two but the way these networking sites have attracted people, that is quite a phenomenon!
Post 1995, the world has changed like never before. 24x7 job throws us in a grinding machine, office is taking so much of time that relationships are paying for that! Divorces are rising; psychological problems are taking the toll on urban youth, insomnia, hyper tension, anxiety has become a common phenomenon in almost all the household.
And here comes the immense effect of social networking. It is engrossed people in various activities, it starts with ‘friend request’, ‘sending message’, ‘wall post’…. These are really good as it helps finding long-lost friends of school or college, it gives a chance to keep in touch with even distant family members. It gives an opportunity to make new ‘friends’! These aspects of social networking is good but at the same time several games like Farmville, Café World, Mafia Wars are making us mad!
Those who are addicted in these games, they are missing classes if they are school or college students, office employees are giving their heart n soul in farming keeping aside their assignments, if anyone is serious about his or her pending works, he/she is taunted by colleagues for not giving enough time to these games!!
Letter writing has become a thing of past. Even e-mails have become distant second in race with sms! Phones (be it mobile/landline) are still going strong! But the clear winner is Face Book or Orkut! People are just posting on your wall to know how you are doing, where are you now, various other questions and all the wishes! They are not even feeling to call each other over the phone or of making a visit to their households! Days are not far away when wedding invitation, death news and all other news will come through these networking sites!
I believe, Social Networking sites are actually destroying the relationship. I am not focusing on the privacy factor, but isn’t it a phone call once in a while or meeting with people once after long interval more healthy and cordial than posting messages on your wall?
As the proverb goes, ‘out of sight/out of mind!’ Actually social networking is making us mechanical, we are losing our tender emotions, and we are becoming unsocial by stop calling or meeting friends and relatives!
It’s like the discovery of Dynamite. The ‘boon’ for the society later proved a bane too. I guess social networking is taking the same route by making us unsocial and addicted to the sites, not to the people we care for!

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