Pritam's Blog
The Curious Case Of Social Networks
The chatbox beeped…
It was a Facebook friend. She had been expressing her desire to meet this Utopian, wannabe artist and writer at least once, and so I decided to fulfil her wish. I met her a couple of weeks ago…
And she never texted me again after we met (I wasn’t expecting her to text me after the meeting anyway)…
Until today …
“You are not half as lively and wild in real life as you are on Facebook…You were not at all angry and hyper…Not even sweet…or intelligent… You were…dead?” The message read.
I realised that she was disappointed with me. I wasn’t surprised though…
But I was surprised that she was unable to accept it, and that’s why she texted me after so many days…
“Hummm…” I replied.
“I wasn’t expecting you to be like this…”
“Like what?” I asked…
“So lifeless… so emotionless.. .”
“I can’t be so angry and hyper all the time…I am an ordinary human, you see. And that means I am entitled to be ‘dead’ most of the times if not all the time,” I replied…
She didn’t get it. Her entire understanding of me was based on my Facebook posts, and she didn’t want to think of me as anything other than that.
She said, “I was expecting something grand from you…like your Facebook posts…”
And her response bothered me for a few moments… I thought that I had been misguiding my online friends into believing that I was so and so…24*7…
But then it occurred to me that I give only one post a day…Maximum two… That too between 9 and 11 pm at night… And even if people “like” my post, even if they think that it’s ‘grand’, doesn’t mean it was spontaneous… It is, in most of the cases, an outcome of going through a daylong procedure of introspection…
And then I realised that that too makes me wild… and intelligent to some extent too…
I realised it was the girl who was being highly irrational… For she had expected me to be ‘grand’ 24*7… I realised that she was so consumed by her misconceptions and preconceptions that it didn’t occur to her that I am a human too at the end of the day…
And I realised that just because she was disappointed with me didn’t mean I had disappointed her… And this realization enlightened me. For I understood that being a disappointment in the eyes of someone doesn’t necessarily mean you are a disappointment. Sometimes it just means that people had unearthly expectations from you.