It’s that time of the year when I look at my Facebook profile and start checking out the number of friends I have.
And I don’t mean I look at their profile pictures and spend time wondering how my next profile picture needs to be clicked.
No.
What I mean is that, I open the social media site, hit up my profile and read the number written next to the Friends link, that shows me how many ‘friends’ are living in my virtual circle.
I remember the first time I went on Orkut and created my profile. Whoa, the rush I felt at having finally entered the online friendship world. It seemed difficult initially and took me quite some time to figure out what it was all about and how one went about meeting people, find out old long-lost friends and build connections.
But I did it. And also managed to find friends from my real life online.
That was fun.
I forget how the entire Orkut thing worked, but yes, after a time, the world found a new place to hang out, and that soon became the giant adda(and may I also add voyeur place) that Facebook has become.
Image Credit: Youtube
You all know the rigamarole. We were obsessed with putting up our pictures and sharing every few minutes on how much the ‘like’ count went up.
Those numbers of likes on a picture had greater significance than the latest news to rock the world. If there weren’t enough, it was enough to ruin the day.
Things were fine, the number of virtual friends kept on increasing, the number of times I laughed out loud or connected with a sad soul on Facebook was also at an all-time high. My social life, on the virtual platform at least, was rocking.
I started feeling envious of my own life.
And at the same time, the balance shifted.
The number of friends I had for real reduced, I lost touch with many of them because I was always so busy in my virtual life, who had time to go out and socialize?
And who would I go out with? All my ‘friends’ were equally busy on Facebook, remember?
And maybe, so were you.
Today, Mark Zuckerberg is changing a lot of the ways in which Facebook works, so that users get to spend more time with their families and friends than looking at random videos and posts. I feel it’s a great way to make users stay, even though it could be termed as an ironic move.
Even as I write this, I have started my bi-annual Facebook cleaning project, when I go through my entire friend list and try to remove those I may not know personally, or other reasons as it applies.
What happens after I remove people from my friend list and they realize they are not there with me anymore? That’s a different story that I promise I will share soon.
For now, let me take out my virtual broom and go cleaning.
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