SOCIAL MEDIA – HOW DOES IT AFFECT ME?

“Hello uncle.”

I turned back hearing the tender voice. A boy, hardly in his early teens, standing there and looking straight at me.

“Yes?”

“What’s the score uncle?”

“I don’t have a radio with me, son.”

“Radio!” To my surprise both of them suddenly burst out laughing, as I wondered what’s so funny in not having a radio in my pocket!

“Uncle, you have a phone with you, right? A smartphone? Yes? So, why depend on radio? Go to social media and check”, a friend of the interrogator, who came running to know what was so funny, described it to me.

The boy, hardly eleven or twelve years old, brought out a smartphone from his pocket, one that would make my mobile appear a toy, and demonstrated the process to me. Well, I was too ashamed to admit that I hardly understood a word of what he said!

No matter how I try to explain it to him, he won’t understand. He won’t know how it feels to play in an open ground in the morning and in the afternoon: he knows Angry Bird; and how it feels to wait for your best friend’s letter for a few days; and how it feels to remain disconnected from the world by just creeping into your own room and shutting the doors and the windows. And then the world becomes a slave to your imagination!

And I won’t understand or get used to so easily the way the world has changed over the past few years; the way social media has shaped our lives.

Yet, there’s no denying the fact that it has affected my life as well. When my friend had opened an account for me on Orkut, I hardly expected anything out of it. But suddenly, many things changed. I saw myself connected to people I had lost long ago. Cousins who drifted away years back riding on the flow of life. Friends I never thought I would find again. And new friends I had never met in person.

Orkut was new then. But slowly the craze waned and new social media platforms emerged. Facebook emerged. And it changed life completely. From marketing a dance school that my mother ran to sharing my poems with others online, it was a completely new world.

I still miss my childhood, a time the world was different. A time when there were afternoons of playing cricket, football or just running around with friends. I still miss what used to be a childhood without any online world, without social media or even the internet. I am still not savvy about social media. I don’t feel comfortable surfing social media on my (un)smartphone. I still don’t know how to look into the websites and find scores from it. Yet, I can’t deny that social media has touched me as well. Just in the same way that it has touched and connected millions across the globe.