Jokes apart: Net Neutrality, Frandships and the Likes :)

Columbus would have never strayed from his path if he had the Google map with him and never named the places wrong if he had referred to Wikipedia. The IT revolution came much later, but came as a tsunami. Redefined the way one would look at people, places and relationships. Remember, the old times when one would take years to find a lost friend or a lost face in the crowd. And if the lost face happened to be your love interest, it’d take years of hard effort to just have a sight of the face besides the societal, parental & brethren barriers. With all those struggles, if you could finally succeed in finding the person you wanted in life, you were overwhelmed, treasured them for life, marriage, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and so on followed….We have come of that age now. You wanna know about someone, just google the name, possibility is you will collide with him/her in one or the other social platforms… facebook, whatsapp, instagram, twitter, you name it… Most important is nobody is hiding; everyone is up there - flashing pictures of happiness, sadness, togetherness, craziness, and so on. Your love interest … hmm, let us peep at his/her relationship status… nope, “committed” or ‘in a relationship”. “Cool”,… you would murmur to yourself, “move on”… So your relationship status turns “dating now”….   By the time you moved on, probably your ex-interest’s status has been changed from “committed” to “single” and you would still be thinking to hang around a bit more with the current one before moving on… relationships are no more measured in decades, rather in few years or months or even less..

Well, hold on, relationships are also measured in the number of likes to your posts in the social media… number of followers in twitter or facebook  and that defines your (social media) status… if your pictures get more number of likes than your friends in the social media then you have a hugely popular status.. maybe you have already felt like a celebrity… So the other day, one of my young acquaintances came to me… he was suffering from depression, contemplating to leave his studies because of that… I tried to probe a bit… so I tried to be bit social medial… “hey dude, what’s up?”… I probed in a friendly voice… pat came the reply, “nothing fine… you know what, I have a screwed up my life… no one likes my posts in facebook, no followers on twitter, no girlfriends, to say the least a very miserable life”… oops, touched the wrong chord… “well, so what’s next?”, I quipped… “no, I’m leaving everything, studies, college, classmates… none interests me.. I’m on medication for depression”… “hold on” I pursued…  “see nobody leaves a career because of facebook or twitter, come on!”… “but what do I do? I’m feeling left out in the crowd, when I don’t get a “like” to my posts or pictures in facebook, it seems as if no one likes me and I’m worthless… as if everyone is mocking at me… but if I get few likes I feel socially uplifted” he went on…. Sure enough I tried my best at consoling and counseling him till he somehow came to terms with the fact that he’d leave social media, maybe temporarily, and not his career, though that was not the best solution…. That reminded me of my latest interaction with a long lost cousin…  I met her in one of the family functions, we got connected, she stays in Dubai and to continue the relationship, I asked her if she was there in any of the social media platforms… she said she was not there because it’s the number of “likes” that decides the strength of relationships and she had seen many relationships/friendships ruining because of that… hmm, interesting!

Well, I’m no psychologist, so can’t really give long prescriptions for such cases, but all I probably know that relationships are delicate fabrics and let that not be defined by virtual connections… being neutral to the influence of internet and social media tsunami is how I define my “net neutrality”… and if we can maintain that neutrality then it’s not (inter)net that’ll define our relationships, rather the strength of our relationships that will decide the strength of all our real relations  and virtual relations…

“Mujhse frandship karoge (will you do friendship with me)?”, someone popped up in my facebook chat box… “Noooo….”, I screamed through my touch pad!

(Inspired by few real life cases)