A Dozen Confessions of a Facebook-aholic

1. It’s been observed that the only time I’m quiet in a group situation is when I’m posting pics and writing about them on Facebook.
2. I get very antsy and existential (“nobody loves me!”) if I don’t get at least six “likes” in the first 15 minutes of posting something. Recently, I cribbed so much that everybody in the group “liked” my post just to shut me up.
3.  It’s also been observed that my selfie arm has become some kind of a bionic extension of me and I take incredible selfies and groupies. It is true that the same bionic arm posts pics on FB almost real time.
4.  When I was of a suitable age (probably 10 or 11), my dad said: “Read the newspaper. It improves you!” Never did. Still don’t. Cannot. Read. Newspaper. The FB news feed is my newspaper. I find it pretty absorbing, entertaining and educational.
5. I don’t understand when people say they have quit FB because it was getting to be “too much.” WhatsApp and its Babel-eque group chatter is too much. Twitter with its opinion-a-minute-athon and trending stats is too much. How could FB with its weak social networking and weak opinions be too much?
6.  A couple of years back, I ran into a friend at an airport. The first 5 – 7 minutes of the conversation was supremely disorienting for me. Then I realized that she hasn’t commented/asked about my activities as reported by me on FB. I asked her and she told me that she’s not on it. I’m so used to all conversations starting in the context of my posts that I think I’ve lost the ability to talk to people who are not on FB and following me.
7.  It pleases me that I have a diverse network, comprising people that range from family members to school teachers to ex-bosses to friends from around the world to friends of my nephews/kids of friends (I think those kids are just being polite) to acquaintances from various walks of life.  They make a very colorful multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-interest world for me to step into every time I access FB.
8. I have some remarkable nature photographers on my network. I admire their dedication, skill and passion. I’m happy that an army of them are out there, scaling every peak, scouring every forest, diving every water body to catalog our richly bio-diverse but rapidly depleting world. Don’t know whether there is any hope for the species that are going extinct every day, but at least there will be some memory of them left somewhere.
9. I agree that FB has rewritten “Catching up with the Joneses” to “Catching up with the Joneses’ happiness.” I often wonder whether FB has made us all bi-polar: manically happy posts interspersed with very low and blue silences.
10. I find it amusing that people equate my high Facebook activity to having a thoroughly public forum life. Like everybody else, I have clearly delineated private and public life/persona too. Yes, I’m an iceberg. My private thoughts are restricted to a small set of people very close to me, who unfortunately have no escape from being privy to the minutiae of my life.
11. I fancy myself as some sort of a decoder, scanning my world through photographs and posts to detect little blips that indicate larger upheavals/events lurking below the surface. A Sherlock Holmes of the Social Network, if you will. I, my friends, often know what you did last summer. Or fall. Or winter, for that matter. And who you did/didn’t do it with. And what does that mean.
12. I find FB Messenger a completely useless app.