In the world of Social Media - Facebook
Kyle Meyers,
Educational Research,
UCL - Institute of Education,
London, England, UK
“Jagoo Re” is the slogan heard in the Tata tea advertisement. This shows what an impact the media has in influencing public opinion. The media has grown from the simple ‘Newsletter’ to the ‘Electronic Media’. This electronic media made the internet a part of its large domain. The media kept on growing and surely will…… Facebook has also become a part of this media. A singer releases his new album put a post on Facebook and gets people to download it. Any ‘morcha’ against corruption or any activity be it sports and drama to name a few, just post it and get it liked, your work is done. This shows how fast the world is growing in media.
As you own your account on Facebook, soon Facebook will own the world account. It was made by Mark Zuckerberg, on the 4th of February ’04, with an intention to make the world a socializing hub and to bring this distant world closer. In the past, if you had a pen, a wristwatch, and spectacles then you were surely a man…. But today to claim yourself as a youngster you need to own a Facebook account and you got to access it. If you don’t have your meal a day it's fine, but not being online at least for five minutes is a real shame. My Grandmother once told me, that there was a time when she as a kid would wait with her brothers and sisters for the postman to come with that one letter that her father would send and each child would fight to open that letter and be the first to read it. When she told me this, I gave her a laugh, because for me it was just a click away. Thanks to Facebook. It is because of this Facebook that we can communicate with our parents when we are away from them and that’s not all I can even have a video chat with them. Thus Facebook has helped the world come closer.
Like a sale “Chat for free”, thousands of people ran to it and got lured into it. So much so that the ‘On the move’ is the new form of socializing wherein you can post any comment or any picture anytime and anywhere just via your phone. Thus, after this I would love to ask you one question, “Do you know the things your parents did as they were kids or during their adolescence or youth?” I’m quite certain very few of you’ll know barely two or three incidents which you might have heard when they chat with their friends over a reunion. Now, just look at yourself, you step out into the streets and every Tom, Dick or Harry will know what you have done. Why??? The main cause of it all is the way we have used Facebook, we post a picture of anything mad we do and we don’t realize that Facebook is a world page, the whole world will know. The generations before us didn’t face this problem because there was no Facebook where they could post anything.
But in this fast-paced world we the youth, the so-called dependant future of our country, of our world, have gone so addicted to this Facebook that we have failed to realize what we are going to make of our motherland, Earth. We don’t give time to family or relatives who drop over. We just want to enjoy ourselves with our friends. To add to this the mobile, the smartphone technology, has added fuel to the fire. Not to directly blame them, but it is we who have used Facebook wrongly.
Another interesting term “The Facebook slut”, is a new word that has become a part of the urban dictionary. If you just think of the number of friends you have and how many you know or rather how many you talk to, it might barely be 250-300, but just look at your Facebook account you’ll have a 950-1000+. Why so many friends? This is because we just keep on adding people whom we don’t even know but we also do not note that misusers can be there behind those beautiful pictures which they show on their profile pictures. We, youngsters, enter the world of substance, abuse, and violence due to this illiterate nature of ours. Such people who go on adding unknown people are the ones termed as the Facebook slut, and they seem to be proud of it.
Facebook has indirectly been the major cause of ruining the beautiful language of English. We have changed the ‘you’ to ‘u’, ‘your’ to ‘ur’. And now I would ask you y? O sorry, Why?’ That is what has been happening to us. We seem to be very proud of using these short terms, but I’m quite certain Shakespeare would surely be disheartened by this and you would have to agree with this.
After reading all this the sure question to all your young minds is, “But what can we do? This is a new generation, we are impatient, we are the 5G. But if we realize that as time moves so do we, we can’t be faster than time. We have to realize that our impatience will one day kill us only. I would not say Facebook is good or bad but just think how are you using your Facebook account? Would you like your children to know what you did when you were a kid? Or would you want to ruin English? Do you still want to remain an addict to Facebook or would you love to see ‘the children dancing in the rain’………??