Social media is supposed to be easy and just. It’s the mass engine, takes time but reaches at all the right conclusions. The AAP wins, the Congress loses. The small quirky restaurant wins, the big media advertisers lose. A voiceless intern wins, the pillars of power lose. Unlike in real world, you don’t have to move mountains to get noticed. You do good, put it out there, get dressed and wait for people to lift you on their shoulders.
The larger wheel of social media seems to follow some cycle of Karmic justice. But the smaller cogs behave like dirty little rats. Ask a brand that has not greased palms of bloggers, bribed influencers on Twitter or run contests just to make bribing look fair.
Check your Facebook page and you will see what your friends like. Couple conversations, bad food photos, updates lacking in humour and unremarkable in any other way, new dress photos, ugly baby photos, downloaded from internet screensavers – Facebook loses badly to Twitter when it comes identifying and recommending quality content.
Facebook is a carryover of your personal network – you pass around polite smiles in real life, you pass around polite likes on Facebook. It’s so much like when your friend’s child recites a poem or does a bollywood dance skit, it won’t just be impolite, it will be criminal not to fall all over yourselves in praise. Faceboook resembles real life etiquettes to such as extent that the honesty so intrinsic to social media is lost on it.
These days, when I log into Facebook, I involuntarily smile, as if I am being watched, as if I have come to meet my in laws. On Twitter, you can choose who your friends will be. On facebook, friends are like relatives. And, as it is said, you can’t choose your relatives. It sucks!
