The Virtual Reality - Facebook

I feel terribly guilty for not being able to update my blog for quite some time now. The last few days had been really busy days for me and more often than not, I had been bombarded with lots of adhoc activities so much so that I’m always worn out when I reach home as a result of which I’m just too lazy to get myself working on even planning to write new posts, let alone actually posting them. However, I did keep myself updated on my Facebook page, thanks to the frequent alerts that I get on the Facebook application on my iPhone.

Facebook is indeed, a blessing for millions of people like myself who can easily and quickly stay connected with friends and family, find old friends, foster new relationships and network at the personal as well as at the professional level. However, as is the case with most Facebook users, I have, most of the times, found it downright tricky to navigate social situations and avoid some embarrassing moments too in the virtual world!

Every time I get an alert on my Facebook page in the iPhone, I open it instantaneously expecting something very nice. However, not all alerts are pleasing to the eyes and mind. There will always be one or two offhand, but all the same unpleasant messages, comments or status updates from people on my friend list. I try to justify to myself that feeling good or bad about such updates from my friends are all a part of the virtual game since, having accepted the friend requests, I have, in all implied legality, accepted to bear with any comments, good or bad from people on my friend list, and also let their status updates appear on my newsfeed, whether pleasant, revolting or incriminating.

However, we must bear in mind that communications via virtual world is fast expanding replacing real communications and however unreal as it may seem, we cannot deny even for a moment that for most people (like me), it has become one of the main means of interacting with friends and family with literally no difference from interacting face to face in the real world. Thus, outrageous behavior in the facebook when your real family and close friends are the audience is, I feel, totally unacceptable and going against the ethics of good mannerism.

To start with, it is a bit off-putting when I get a friend request from someone out of the blue, whom I have never even seen or heard of in real life, and who has very little or no introduction about himself/herself in his/her profile page, let alone common friends. In such situations, it is even downright creepy to imagine how the person would have found me in the first place unless such a person is an intrusive stalker or a voracious spammer. I don’t hesitate to confidently hit the ‘ignore’ tab without a second thought in such a case! With a very small and selective list of friends in my friend list, I have always felt confident to share my personal information including lots of photos and updates and I would not want to take the risk of an unwanted intruder to barge into those information and photos.

The other pet-peeves about Facebook is seeing the constant venting of frustrations and the blatant sowing of seeds of suspicion in the minds of the Facebook audience for a certain group or person through slanderous outbursts in the newsfeed. I feel it is alright to vent your frustrations on Facebook. But when someone makes it a regular habit and clogs up my newsfeed with his/her incoherent outbursts, I start doubting the intentions and soon get tired of such person’s updates. Like most people in Facebook, I too do not want to look at my newsfeed and see only depressing status updates and sarcastic ranting. I have already made plans to segregate these group of hypocrites and block them instead of compromising with my good moods based on their perpetually negative status updates.

Finally, what irks me the most in Facebook is people in my friend-list who has a long way to go in learning the basics of Facebook etiquettes and starts behaving as if the two of us are the only people in the site. My Facebook friends includes my wife for whom I am a caring husband, my children, for whom I am a doting father and a role model, my relatives and family members, for whom I am a man of diverse nature and character, my bosses, for whom I am a responsible officer, my sub-ordinates, for whom I am a leader and a guide and my counterpart colleagues and friends from other countries for whom I am a respected government officer of another country. Similarly, the case would be the same for most of the other Facebook users. But at the same time, our friend list would also include old school and college mates with whom pulling of each other’s legs would have been a routine affair in real life and no one actually took it seriously then. But in the midst of these many diverse audience, would it be proper to act in facebook as in the real life? The stark reality is that a simple and a harmless comment in jest purely directed at your close friend but nevertheless, appearing in the newsfeed page of all his/her friends in the friend list may be understood in diversified ways by these diverse audience. Therefore, rather than being categorized as a cyber bully and avoiding chances of unintentionally hurting someone’s image, career or relationships, I always try to draw a certain boundary line which I try not to cross when I interact with people in my friend list even if they are my closest friends in real life, unless I know the entire people in his/her friend list including his/her family too at the personal level. Otherwise, I dare say that I am not qualified to act in the Facebook as I normally do with him/her in real life. If at all I must act funny, then there’s the private message option which need not be seen by anybody except the person for whom such ill-timed 'humour' is meant. We need to use it too at times!

There is no doubt that social media has revolutionized online communication and interactions in Facebook helps keep us alive in the minds of our friends and family whom we donot have the time to meet in reality. But if we throw away the fundamentals of basic Facebook etiquettes to the winds and cross that thin line, situations in facebook can sometimes be painful, creepy, embarrasing or aggravating too. In the end, it is not the spammers, stalkers, game-request senders and strangers who are going to be a source of constant irritation in the Facebook. It is the real-life friends with Facebook etiquette problems with whom our real life relationships can turn sour because of the liberties that we tend to take in the virtual world.

Facebook is real in an unreal way and it has the capability to make or mar our relationships. It is high time that we accept this bitter truth sweetly!