The fictitious world of Facebook
What! You don’t have a Facebook account? Hameed was almost shocked to death when he came to know that his friend Ahmad did not have a Facebook account. As if not having a Facebook account were a crime or as if his being educated was of no use.
It is not only Hameed that thinks like this but almost every one of us believes the same.
The newly released 2020 ‘Internet World Stats» infographic indicates that more than two billion people all over the world are active Facebook users. This evidently shows that one out of every three human on this planet is an active user of Facebook.
Many people ponder over what is wrong if we use Facebook frequently as a means of entertainment or as a way to relieve our stress? Well, there is nothing wrong in it.
However, when Facebook activities start interfering with our everyday life and become disadvantageous to our daily functioning at work, college or in school, we might have a problem.
Although Facebook was supposedly created with the notion of allowing students and young adults to share common interests, with time it has lost this essence. Individuals often start using it to pass the time but it may become an annoying addiction at times.
Often we login to our system to do some productive work but end up wasting our precious time on Facebook by just updating statuses, posting photos and commenting and liking posts.
The major disadvantage of Facebook is that it has a very narrow border line between the preferable passing of time and addiction. One starts using it initially to catch friends and ends up spending a lot of unnecessary time in playful quizzes and exploring various Facebook applications.
The most significant aspect of Facebook in recent times is that it has completely changed the impression of «friendship».
In reality, friendship is a relationship which involves the sharing of mutual interests, trust and the care for each other in each and every aspect of life.
In contrast, friendships created on social networking sites are often meaningless and worthless.
A website like Facebook is geared heavily toward the creation of new “friends” and the amount of “friends” someone has is displayed right on his or her profile page for everybody to see. As nobody wants to be seen as only having a few friends, in the interest of popularity people set out to become friends with anyone and everyone.
Thus within a matter of time, users can establish hundreds, if not thousands, of friendships. It may look like they have a ton of friends but they are actually associates or overwhelmed followers. A friend used to be someone who you knew well and had affection for but today a friend is no more than a person that practices the same social site as we do.
However, as people get used to communicating on Facebook via messaging, sharing photos and posts, commenting and liking others, posts and updates, etc., it may come to a point when they are more comfortable socializing online than offline. They become over-reliant on Facebook to fulfill their social needs and may start sacrificing the time spent in real life with family and friends.
Sometimes we waste much of our time just thinking about what we should type for our status update and which photo should we upload for profile picture. When we have decided what to update and have posted it, we eagerly anticipate how others will respond to it.
After this we get restless while we wait for others to «comment» or ‘like’ what we have posted and so we just keep on checking and re checking our Facebook profile to see if there is any new notifications. To some extent we are all concerned over how we project ourselves to the rest of the world, even when it comes to our online existence.
Most of us have seen friends in our network who almost never fail to appear on our newsfeed each time we log on to our profile. It could be some status update, check in, posting of their photos or such like. Their posts tend to be on very ordinary and trivial matters, such as, “Breakfast at 5:30 a.m.”, “On way to office”, “going to sleep”, “tomato growing in my back yard” and so on.
Although Facebook was advertised as a means of staying connected, now there are no deep connections. Instead it is about what I have, what you have, and what our friends and relatives are up to. It is about creating a false self image that leaves us desperate and distressed. Likewise, Facebook has also given rise to gossip as people have found an easy way to get updates about others’ personal lives.
Frankly speaking, when someone leaves a comment on Facebook, it is more or less seen as an obligation to comment as soon as possible. People who are addicted become restless or troubled, if they are prohibited from using Facebook.
Likewise, most people just keep on sharing quotes, duas, religious sayings and photos, and hadith without verifying whether the dua or hadith they are sharing on Facebook is authentic and factual or how contextual and relevant. They just keep sharing in order to reflect their view of their own sacredness of heart without sincerity of mind to educate the audience. In fact, through this many people try to pretend themselves how religious they are.
Through this background of ignorance about the authenticity of a particular hadith which they share on Facebook, they are likely to commit more sins than earning blessings from the Almighty. They can cause more misconceptions in the mind than leading the way.
In order to gain attention and appreciation, Facebook users often feel the desire to promote themselves through an idealistic image. Thus, in the virtual world of online networking, people are free to create a separate lifestyle that deviates from their true, actual daily life.
Thus users express themselves in almost whatever manner they desire. Hence, information, pictures, and other content are all carefully chosen to create their desired personal identity. Every profile is carefully planned and presented. Picture selection is one of the means of self promotion. Usually done to make themselves look more appealing, users will only share photos of themselves where they look no less than perfect.
It is apparent that Facebook provides people with a great opportunity to lie. If everyone really lived the lives they present on social media, what a great world this would be! Judging by most Facebook pages, people are cherished, happy, quite cool and really satisfied with life. They present themselves as they desire to be, or maybe somewhat as they are but almost never as they actually are.
Using online networking leads to several consequences that affect us in our daily lives. Users often develop narcissistic qualities because they focusing so much time on how they should portray themselves. Gratuitous consumption of time is also a major consequence of online networking.
All in all, social networking sites like Facebook have been structured to encourage increased participation, while all the while creating a sense of curiosity of what others are doing at any point in their lives. Online networking can become an addiction and a distraction from the more important things in life.
Well! I do not wish to be categorical as to whether using Facebook is unproductive or not. It is entirely up to individuals to assess the psychological damage a social networking site like Facebook may do to the harmonious development of individual personalities, affecting the rhythmical balance of the growing self in a man or a woman and so on. What should be kept in mind is that Facebook in itself has gone far beyond its genuine objectives for which it was created; rather it has become an «objective» of life in itself for a majority of its users.
