Skip to main content

Social Media and I

 


We live in spurious times. The realities around us are manufactured by the media, by governments, corporations, religions, and organisations. What is really tragic is that spuriousness is accepted as normal. You keep sending messages knowing that they are spurious. You know it, the receiver of your messages knows it, everyone knows it – that the messages are spurious. Yet the messages keep coming and going. Infinity of them.

They have a purpose. Otherwise they wouldn’t survive so long. The method wouldn’t survive, rather: the method of manufacturing realities through fake messages on various media. The process is not confined to social media; you can find it in all the media: the print, the electronic, you name it. Don’t forget that even the road is a part of media. Have you observed the enormous billboards on roadsides? If you have, you will understand how they manufacture realities for you.

We can’t live without the media. One way or another we are all parts of it. We receive messages from there, we forward those messages, we are both the prey and the predator. “We become what we behold,” as Marshal McLuhan, philosopher of the media, said. “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Our governments know that and they spend huge portions of their revenues on propaganda, on manufacture of realities. There are paid advertisements on the various media and then there is the paid news. There are ingenious other methods too. Even a Statue of Unity is a propaganda measure.

We can’t ignore the media anymore. Even the social media with all its inanities and puerilities deserves our engagement.

I make use of the social media for various purposes though I confine myself mostly to Facebook and marginally to Twitter. WhatsApp is used nowadays in professional occupation more than for anything else. My primary purpose of joining Facebook and Twitter was to publicise my blog posts and a significant number of my readers do come from these two media, according to my Blogger dashboard. But it amuses me no end that hardly anyone has promoted my posts on these media. There’s hardly even a like. So I am forced to conclude that the readers who come from these media are not necessarily people who like my writing; they are probably provoked negatively by my writing. They are people who would love to drive in a knife between my ribs if they could. I have often wondered why I fail so miserably as a writer: why I don’t inspire more than provoke. I guess I can’t help my own perversions.

The subject of this post is more social media and less I. So let me return to it.

From promoting my blog, I moved on swiftly to learning a lot from the social media. I began to take note of certain pages on Facebook like Beef Janata Party and Unofficial Dr Arnab Goswami which enlightened me in their own unique ways. I began to read quality stuff brought by online portals like The Wire and The Quint. I found these portals bringing more and better information than my morning’s print newspapers.

I find the social media useful and productive. I use them effectively, rather. I guess it is up to us to choose how we use the media. Occasionally I put up pictures on Facebook and they get a lot of likes. But my writing seldom does. I would have preferred the other way around. I wish my writing drew more positive attention. But a fish can’t choose its kind of water.

What bugs me the most these days is erstwhile friends telling me when they call (which is rare, mercifully) that they don’t read my blogs anymore but it so happened that they read this particular one… Well, I know they are reading. I know they don’t like it. I know they are also manufacturing realities in their own ways. I wish we all didn’t have to manufacture so many illusions.

PS. This was provoked by Indispire Edition 351: How are you managing Social Media? Are you up-to-date in sharing images, posts, comments, replies etc.? Any SM management tips? #SocialMediaTips

 

Comments

  1. Well, I think you should be a salmon then, go after the waters that you want to be in..., (motivation sucks) atleast the knowledge you earned stays with you...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We can't choose the water anymore. It is being chosen for us by others.

      Delete
  2. Well I personally think blog readership has declined in the pandemic year. I get fewer readers too. Doesn't stop me from ranting on my blog but yes, I try looking for other avenues.
    I don't trust social media anymore. Minority, majority, pro gov, anti gov...I don't know which piece to trust and how much. Most people are only earning their peanuts through this propaganda. I also feel ultimately we will believe what we want to without questioning its authenticity. So what we believe in will never be propaganda for us. In that sense propaganda now is only to strengthen pre existing beliefs and ideas.
    But I enjoy your blogs and I often think about what you write. As for blogging, I don't see much hope for it with SM campaigns and fb and insta pages taking the limelight.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Blogging in the traditional sense is losing its sheen. But I'm not switching over to popular alternatives just because writing is a passion for me. Nothing else can take its place. Even if readership declines I'll retain writing as long as I am able.

      Delete
  3. I am not a social media animal. I have found the activity prevailing there less positive, more negative. Hence I am on Twitter, FB and WhatsApp but maintain a token presence only. I understand what you are going through because as you have yourself asserted in a different post that today's India (and the Indians active on social media) lacks profundity. Those places and platforms can never be my cup of tea where superficiality enjoys the last laugh with chicanery roaming around sans any check. I write for my heart's content only (Svaantah Sukhaay) and that's why lesser readership (especially for my Hindi writings) doesn't dishearten me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're right, the social media is quite a frivolous place where hooligans rule. Especially Facebook. I'm there like a pilgrim encountering his unique kind of spiritual world.

      Writing is also an equally selfish affair for me. Nevertheless it'd be good to have more reader-engagement.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...