Dreams of the Day

I’m getting pretty peeved right now. All of a sudden, I’m sick again. After yesterday’s late-night lab session, I felt strangely cold. Not as in emotionally cold, but physically cold. I felt the onset of fever. As I threaded home with a slight tremble, I was perplexed with my current condition. I should have already adapted to the changing of weather.

Perhaps those late nights in my lab finally managed to press me down. Or perhaps mental strain has dispersed into my physical body. Who knows?

Despite this, I can’t help myself from feeling relieved that I have no exams now, or this ailment will be extremely troublesome. Don’t get me wrong, I hate being sick. I hate it so much, even more than drinking orange juice after using mouthwash.

You know what else I’m starting to hate? Facebook. Well, not really but I have somehow gotten a glimpse on how Facebook is not actually a social networking site. It is actually an anti-social networking site. It gives people the impression that they are connected.

In other words, communicating via Facebook is a shallow communication. Every day, we look at our screen and we like or comment on our friends’ statuses. Those statuses rarely contain much depth, are trivial although some can be considered witty. However, these interactions are rarely memorable or life-changing. This is because Facebook is convenient. Well, convenience is good, but it comes with a cost. This convenience causes us to interact with our friends out of convenience, not because we want to. When we do something without the ‘want’, we often lose tract on what we do. That applies here too. These convenient interactions will fail in every way to be memorable.

Because of this, Facebook becomes addictive. Why are non-memorable interactions addictive, you ask? It is because Facebook gives us a false sense of socializing. Being active in Facebook gives us the sense of us filling up our social bucket. But alas, it is just but a false fill. Like drinking salt water or digging a hole just to fill another hole. It gives a sense of satisfaction, but it leaves us ‘hungry’ afterwards. As we become more active, our social bucket becomes bigger and as it becomes bigger, we rely on Facebook to fill it up. Here, a vicious cycle is formed.

It is clear that Facebook activity could never replace face to face interactions. When we have face to face interactions, we are addressing an individual. Strange as it may seem, Facebook interactions are different. You see, with Facebook, the ‘friends’ that we interact with loses their individuality and becomes a collective.

When we post an update or a photo, who do we post it for? Which friend are we updating? Strangely, I felt that I wasn’t sharing it with anyone in particular, just with the collective community known as Facebook. When people ‘like’ our status, we have the false sense of achieving something but in reality, it doesn’t really mean anything. Just think, what were the last 5 things you ‘liked’ in Facebook? Can’t recall? The same thing happens to those friends who ‘likes’ your status. Similarly, an LOL isn’t really laughing out loud, a =) isn’t really a smile and a ***hugzzz*** isn’t really a hug.

We, or more specifically I, have become over-reliant on Facebook. It is my main method in contacting friends be it for important stuff or just to ask how are they. While there may be genuine concern by me, my friends may not feel the same and I can’t blame them considering how shallow Facebook has made our interactions.

All this ranting was caused by one factor. In my previous post, I noted that I had forgotten a birthday of a good friend of mine. I realised that I actually had forgotten a few birthdays of theirs albeit being in a whole different country. It dawned upon me how reliant I was on Facebook and how I know that even if I did remember their birthday, wishing them in Facebook didn’t make much of a difference. What I really wanted to do was ask them how they spent their birthdays and how they were getting on. A simple ‘HBD’ and a ‘like’ in return wasn’t going to cut it.

So, as I continue dwelling in my sudden epiphany on my social life while bemused by how I’m suddenly sick, Toodles!