Nidhis.daily.blog

Tag: social media

  • (Anti) Social media

    Social media has its roots in building community. It all started as an alternate avenue for people to talk to others, share their thoughts via words and pictures and build virtual digital community. The early days of IM aka Instant Messaging and even Facebook was to bring people together by consuming what’s happening in their lives.

    See me, don’t see me

    Fast forward to today. There is no ‘social’ aspect left in the social media platforms being used nowadays. The goal is for all to reach all with the objective of either sharing knowledge or sharing pure fun and joy sometimes even meaningless stuff. This in some of the formats which aim at making information available to anyone and everyone, there is no aspect of social element left. The invisible string of algorithm controls what we see and what we do next. In a way associations are getting replaced by algorithms. Connections are getting replaced by content. Interactions are getting replaced by influencers. Relations are now replaced by reels. Listening to each other is now replaced by livestreams. Videos have taken place of visits. Number of shares have taken place of sincere genuine talks. Face to face conversations are not displaced by chats.

    Not that we are not to be blamed. Collectively we have started harnessing the power of this tool to assimilate knowledge about even mundane, unimportant and trivial topics. Now that information is available at fingertips, we don’t think but look it up instead. That too on specific social media platforms; ofcourse we know where to get genuine current affairs and hacks to develop a green thumb! Thus we are slowly confining our creativity and brainstorming ability to discover the ‘how’, the process on our own. Even if some of us awaken to this aspect of our over-consumption and try to interact with these tools in the true, primitive sense the smart algorithms we built act as deterrents.

    But hope is not all lost. There is a silver lining even in this dark cloud. As hyper-capitalists we now have tools to connect to each other in real life this giving rise to apps for dating, social meet-ups etc. More on that in the next one!

  • Live more, consume less

    It actually is very exciting to be busy living, thriving the way you want, growing and being more than you were yesterday.

    And it’s even more exciting to be able to share it with others. Your inner group, your circle, the folks who knows you for the roles or relations you play in their lives.

    And it’s a thrill to go public with your life’s nuances – the high one seems from the validation got from the anonymous online world. Your life’s trivials could go viral and seemingly mundane stuff could grab more eyeballs than imagined.

    It’s this high that drives ‘creators’ and ‘influencers’ of this era. Not that we as public are to abstain completely from consuming what’s available. It’s a good source of information but the magic is in finding the balance. To let ourselves decide what we consume rather than the being a slave to the algorithm.