Facebook Moments

“Noori! You cannot keep watching YouTube videos on my cell phone”. I must have screamed a hundred times that day. “Okay Baba, can I look at pictures on your facebook?” I came really close to losing it again, but exactly at that moment I had a facebook status-like epiphany.

“Noori, is facebook a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked of my 5-year-old kindergartner. The conversation that it generated led to interesting realizations. “FB is good Baba, because you can see photos on it”, said Noori. I was not oblivious to the emphasis that my kindergartner was placing on the acronym. Rayaan, my 10-year-old son happened to be present then. One might have very easily overlooked him, as is the norm [he prefers being in the background]. This time around, although it appeared that he was deep into his book, he was listening in. “FB is bad because people spend too much time on it”, was the comment from the ‘wise old man’. “No Bhai, it’s fun because you can find out what’s happening in people’s homes”, was the counter argument presented by the tech-savvy Noori. “But people still waste too much time on it”, Rayaan persisted. He was probably alluding to his own family members who were likely spending inordinate amounts of time on FB.

“Just like other inventions, FB has both good and bad qualities”, said I. That seemed to pacify them for the moment.

Later I started thinking about my own reluctance to completely submit to social media like FB, twitter, link’d in, and so on. The advent and infiltration of social media in our lives has been an interesting phenomenon. But wholly giving in to it, or not, has been a flirtation like never before. I use FB for posting links to our work, and thus, this medium is much needed for publicity. It has its use after all. Until you realize that the amount of time you’re spending on updating statuses, placing photographs and commenting is eating away at your time that might just be put to better use elsewhere. For instance, on actual work!

The above might indicate that FB has divine qualities, given that one can ‘submit’ to it. On the other hand, FB has human qualities. Like a friend in real time, FB can be ego-boosting or ego-bashing. FB feeds my ego when I get a thumb’s up aka “like” on a link, comment, status or picture. On the flip side, what nags me at times is not getting enough “likes”— so there is a greed for likes. My mind then goes into this thought process: “If no (or not enough) ‘likes’ then does that mean my ‘friends’ on FB dislike what I’m posting or are they just indifferent?” You see, apathy really hurts. I know that I can make that choice: to either submerge myself in the virtual world of just-enough-but-not-more-than-that connectivity, or become a social pariah by shunning it.

How does either decision impact my children? I’m not so sure but I can predict based on my kiddos ‘comments’ when I showed them a picture of Rayaan, as a baby, from my FB photos. “OMG! OMG! OMG!” said Rayaan, and “LOL!” screamed Noori.

[from An Itinerant Observer]

Acknowledgment: A version of this story appeared under the title 'Ray' in the book 'An Itinerant Observer'.