Goodbye social networking, hallo reality!

By Dorcas Mutai

Social networking, boy does it make us feel like we have a life! We have all these photos where we are surrounded by our ‘friends’ having a good time. That’s until everyone finds out that the ‘myriad friends’ are colleagues and the ‘good time’ you have is a compulsory team building session your company paid for. So much for having a life….

Miss popularity

Out here, the rest of us that are looking through your photos wonder why you are the only one who seems to be having a great life. So we up the ante by carrying our cameras around, so we can take and download ‘fun’ photos on the go. And after uploading, we keep refreshing the page to see how many friends ‘liked’ our photos or commented on them. Then we sit back smiling smugly because we now look like we also have a life and a fun one at that.

Think of it like this, when we flash back to our high school days, the tables seem to have been turned. Our current little Miss Popularity was just a fat, zit-faced, shy girl who never took part in drama festivals or sports day. She would avoid activities that involved socialising, especially with boys. She was so painfully shy that it was equally painful for the boys to chat her up. And knowing high school boys, they did not put much effort, especially if there was something better nearby that needed less effort. Needless to say, she went through high school without ever being ‘hooked up’ to any boy, even from that shady school next door.

Fast forward to the present and Miss Shy Girl has morphed into Miss Popularity. Everyone seems to want to be her friend (on Facebook) and her life (on Facebook) seems to be happening! Our new Miss Popularity now looks like she has the party scene down to a tee. She finally broke out of her little shell and maybe, it might just be that she is trying to prove a point with her ‘fun-filled pictures’.  That she has a life and is now enjoying it.

So anyway, I decided to create my own little reality checklist. Take it for fun or otherwise….

1.    Do you change your status updates at least thrice a day?

2.    Are your status updates aimed at letting people know how awesome your life is and how theirs suck?

3.    Do you post photos every Monday morning on your weekend’s escapades?

4.    Do your captions reek of fun, fun and more fun?

5.    Do you snoop on others photos just to see if they are having more fun than you?

6.    Do you always reply to every event invite as ‘Maybe Attending’ because you are so busy having fun you can’t squeeze in more fun to your fun-packed diary?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, you might need to turn off your computer, get up and go outside. The sun is shining bright and that green stuff on the ground, that my friend is grass. Try interacting with real people and if you are lucky, you may not have to try so hard to impress them. It’s, however, not as easy as I am putting it because out here in the real world, you cannot have 689 friends, neither can you have 45 people commenting on everything you say. The surreal is left on that glowing little screen and this, my friend, is reality.