I am not a tech-savvy person
I am not a tech-savvy person. While everyone around me has graduated to the iPod touch and MacBook Air, I remain faithful to my 1-gigabyte second-generation iPod Nano and 40-gigabyte iBook G4, both of which I believe were manufactured at the turn of this century.
When even junior undergraduate students at my university have a hard time deciding which one to pick up first, their iPhone or BlackBerry Touch, I still proudly flaunt that cluttered clamshell Nokia that T-Mobile gave me when I subscribed to its service almost two years ago. I relish carrying those big, clunky things called vinyl records, when everyone else gets their music just by clicking the “Buy” button in the iTunes online music store.
I don’t subscribe to Luddism, an idea developed by artisans in 19th-century England, which advocated the destruction of machines for all the ills they had brought to society. I am probably just one among a growing number of people who have come to the realization that, more often than not, (Internet) technology only brings excess (if not harm) than good.
Case in point: Facebook, the social networking site that is now all the rage. This site’s raison d’être is the promise that you can find people you knew during high school or college, and by hitting the “Add as friend” button, you can be friends once again and relive the glory of more youthful days (as if this in itself is an interesting proposition).
What Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had in mind when he conceived this site from his Harvard dorm room (if we believe that he did not steal the idea from his much smarter friends) was probably that it would appeal to our altruism, that human beings are not naturally misanthropic, and that we have the natural tendency to care for others.
But now, after more than 130 million souls worldwide have been reconnected, most of them now basking in the warmth of artificial human interaction, Facebook has degenerated into a machine that appeals to our narcissism.
Thanks to Facebook, you can now get information on the breakfast menu of people whom you only marginally know in real life. By dint of this social networking site, we are now witnessing the birth of a new generation of writers whose aspirations to be wordsmiths would put Oscar Wilde to shame.
Suddenly, all of my “friends” have turned into music critics, laboriously dissecting the lyrics of Richard Marx songs or posting You Tube videos of elevator music salesman Kenny G. On a lucky day, you can even stumble upon a transcript of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61
Revisited.
But unless you are Claire Danes or the above-mentioned folk singer, I don’t care whether you have scrambled eggs or caviar for breakfast. Unless you are Fareed Zakaria or The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff, I won’t spend my precious little time to read through what you have to say about the war in Gaza or the US election.
And unless you post a You Tube video of a live performance by British sad sack Nick Drake or footage of New York singer Jeff Buckley performing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” after which he said Assalamualaikum, I won’t bother hitting the “Play” button.
Let’s face it people: our lives are mostly boring and nobody really cares what color clothes we wore today or what background music you put on today. And in spite of the colorful photos you put online, nothing will change the fact that you live a boring life.
Quoting US President Barack Obama, I have got a healthy ego, and until late last year, I played by the Facebook rule. I regularly updated my status – which, compared to those of my 200-plus online friends, is only mildly self-centered – posted the photos of my daughter’s first day at school or at times shared links from The New Yorker, Rolling Stone or The Economist.
But then I realized that I wasn’t really an interesting person and I doubted that even my closest friends in real life would want to know if I had lost my skill in pancake-making or what new music I had just found. I also doubted that people had any interest in what I read in those highfalutin magazines.
If anything, they would have accused me of snobbery and elitism for sharing the links. I also didn’t have the pride to put up photos of my daughter and wife, just to give the impression that I had a happy marriage.
Last month, I put a lock on all my daughter’s photos on Facebook, fearing that some child predators could walk her home from the school bus before me. Out of respect for people’s privacy, I now send messages directly to their inbox and reduce the function of Facebook only as a substitute for email.
I can feel the suffering of those who have to bear with the junk put up on their Facebook walls by people who we don’t really care if they don’t appear on our list of friends in the first place. And by junk, I mean flirtatious rants, overworked greetings or unfunny jokes.
So for the sake of my sanity, please don’t write on my wall.
—M. Taufiqurrahman
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