The 'face' I fear

I have not always been uncomfortable with the idea of online social networking. It is a great way to keep in touch with people, an easy way to keep each other updated of what's going on their lives. I remember orkut from my first year of engineering and it was all fun to add people from school as friends, send meaningless 'hey, how are you scraps' and compare who had a higher number of scraps and testimonials. It was all in good humour. When the website was blocked in BITS, my enthusiasm to be active on it went away along with it. All the silly antics on orkut was confined to holidays. Though on the surface it looked harmless and fun, there were obvious signs of people stalking others online. The terrible privacy settings coupled with easy access made things worse. But then again, orkut is an old story. Since then, online social networking had a face-lift, pun intended. The interface facebook has is so good that it didn't take too long for (almost) everyone to get on it. I think over the past few years, facebook has been constantly trying hard to improve privacy settings and make them easy enough for people to actually use them. In a way, they probably have been able to dissuade users from stalking profiles online.  

Personally I have two major fears when it comes to social networking websites:

The first and the lesser of the two is about the personal information overload on facebook. A lot of people either due to poor privacy setting or out of their own free will put up a lot of information about themselves and their lives. It's a given that if someone puts something on the internet, its there for everyone to read it. But, it is also the fuel needed by stalkers. Let us set aside stalkers for a moment, does one really need to know so much about someone with a few simple clicks. There is an information overload online, about people who you don't know and probably will never know in person. I am certain everyone has been in situations where they might feel much better off not knowing something someone did or said or felt. The information overload pretty much blurs the lines of what is private and what is not. A friend once said that 'this is the future of social interaction, you need to accept and adapt to it'. I concede this probably is the future of social interactions, where people rely on quick online profile checks to know more about a person than talk to them, where everyone has a 1000 friends online, where quick online updates reduce the effort to keep in touch with everyone in person. I do not want to debate about the future. In the present, there is a definite information overload, where the line that divides whats private and what's not is very blur.

The second and the more serious issue is about the bloated sense of self importance and recognition. The ease with which many facebook users tend to update others with every thought, intelligent or otherwise, that crosses their minds is rather interesting. Consider a situation where you are either witnessing or part of something that interests you; have you had the urge or even the slightest inclination to update others about your whereabouts? Have you had the urge to quickly upload a photo or update your status message to let everyone else know about it? I am fairly certain almost everyone would have felt like doing so at some point of time or the other. Is it because everyone want's others to know how interesting or important their life is? There definitely is a strong desire to be recognized, revered and remembered in everyone. Social networks give an easy platform to achieve this like nothing else could. Now, every moment of one's life can be recorded; 'immortalized' in some sense. Knowing that your thoughts and memories are recorded somewhere, available for everyone to read gives a pseudo sense of recognition; a feeling of importance. Every like and every comment, however serious or casual they may be, is the pat on the back everyone looks for. Now that all your thoughts and memories are saved online, the unspoken hope is that there is a good chance they that will be remembered. Recognize, revere, remember; agreed social networking probably is the boon for the socially inept, but it definitely has gone dangerously beyond just enabling the socially inept. It has enabled people in general to draw a sense of self importance, sometimes bordering narcissism, through vicarious means. In the whole process, the importance of one's thoughts and feelings are lost. Instead of enjoying the moment, sometimes people are stuck in the pleasure they would vicariously derive when everyone on their friends list come to know about what an amazing time they had. 

If the line between what is personal and what is public becomes blurred, and if the sense of recognition and a sense of importance of one's thoughts and feelings are derived vicariously from social networking sites; would there be any more value for the very things that we want to be recognized, revered and remembered for?