By Lin Tan
I am perusing through my Facebook homepage for a daily dose of status updates. I see that one friend is baking cupcakes, another desperately wants to go on holiday (and desperately indeed, with not one but five exclamation marks to emphasise the pressing urgency), and one has sore nipples. My favourite update of the day actually comes in a series of posts, published at five-minute intervals, documenting an arduous journey from one supermarket aisle to another (otherwise known as riveting stuff).
Often after reading Twitter bulletins or Facebook statuses, there’s a moment’s pause, followed quickly by the sound of crickets chirping. Then silence. Once upon a time, stalking was frowned upon but nowadays, with a crazed, wide-eyed smile, we are happy to slap a plaque on our foreheads that screams, ‘Stalk me! Please?”
Sure, social media has its goodness. When I want to find out about the latest event or any new products from my favourite brand, I need only to check out the respective Twitter account and I’m immediately in the know. Keeping in touch with international friends is made easier, and there’s always a bunch of photographs from great nights out I can drag onto my desktop. I am not, however, enlightened by announcements along the lines of, “Woo…I blinked!”
Aside from being a great marketing tool, social networking sites are like toilet bowls insomuch as they harbour our mind’s excreted thoughts, purged from our need to feel important. But why do we feel so inclined to tell people what we are doing or how we are feeling, no matter how mundane the tell-all may be? Do we simply have nothing better to do than tell folks that we have nothing better to do?
I believe the answers to those questions can be found in the (mostly) intolerable movie, Shall We Dance. I kid you not. Apart from Richard Gere’s suspect dance moves, there’s a memorable quote from the film uttered by Susan Sarandon’s character. She says, “We all need a witness to our lives,” – a statement I believe carries an unassailable truth, key in explaining why we’ve become so neurotic with telling the world about the frivolous activities we engage in.
There is no denying that our lives would be so incomplete without friends or significant others to share it with. Apart from money and that highly enjoyable recreational activity (you know which one I’m talking about), we humans need to communicate with one another in order to survive, which is why we have thumbs – to text, and to beat down on the space bar. Even more so, we all have a pet called ‘ego’, sometimes referred to as ‘self-interest’, which like a dog, needs stroking and attention. With the world moving at a gigabyte a second, it is not difficult to sometimes feel left behind or forgotten, and so; I tweet, therefore I am. And sometimes, we tweet about absolutely nothing, just to remind people that we’re here – a favourable act to indulge our egocentricities.
Keeping up with the rat race is like chasing after a departed bus whilst screaming, “Hey, wait for me!” Even instruments of communication like our beloved mobile phone are constantly being replaced by newer models. Before we can let out a fart, the new phone we purchased is deemed obsolete. Social-networking sites like Twitter and Facebook came to us in era when we needed it most. As time speedily leaks out of our ears, it is hard to remember what we actually did on any given day. Social media acts as a kind of public journal – a micro-blogging site – where we can inform on-call bystanders in a nano-second of our whereabouts and activities, whilst at the same time, going about our day and satisfying our ‘look-at-me’ complex. Besides, telling friends what you’ve been up to face-to-face is so ‘90s.
This notion is further supported by the fact that the average Internet user spends almost fifty days a year online Web browsing, Google-stalking, YouTubing, and what-have-you. To be frank, aside from online chat, spending all that time cooped up indoors, nurturing a one-sided relationship with our computer can hardly be called human interaction. However, we know that many of our friends are spending their time equally on the web, such that if we don’t participate in the beehive of online communication, we run the risk of being out of mind from the many that do. Thus, it seems only natural that we are drawn to tweeting and updating the status of our lives, even while we are at the office (though a lot of our posts are replied to by our workmates, who are, incidentally, sitting at B.O. distance from us).
Before Facebook, I don’t recall having more than twenty-five people I could honestly call my mates. It seems my popularity has increased over the course of the last two years as my ‘friends’ list has more than tripled since then, which by Facebook standards actually ranks me as quite low on the popularity scale – damn you high school. In truth, most of the extra ‘friends’ I’ve accumulated on social-networking sites should be changed to what it more appropriately describes: ‘witnesses’ – individuals integral in appeasing my self-important needs.
But of course, there are some on our ‘friends list’ who are genuine friends, ones we can safely recall sharing nights of debauchery and laughs with. Being called a bystander has the potential to suck out the sentimentality in a relationship. But is it not true that as friends, we are also witnesses? Wasn’t I a spectator when you drunk-dialled your ex? Why else would you tell me that you’re “eating a can of tuna”? I have gained nothing from your status update, except for hunger pangs – thanks, ‘friend’. (Note to self: return favour when eating fried chicken).
So as you read about my voyage home, or a dream I had last night, or as you ‘like’ or comment on my status; what I’m really trying to say is, thanks for reading – you complete me.
Now, all we need is witness protection – to sift out the soporific declarations of nothingness.
