A few days ago, I was sitting with a few friends at our local hangout, waiting for our order.
The small TV was showing a special news report on sun signs, and why it was essential for people born under the sign of Sagittarius to eat 2-3 spoonfuls of sugar that day.
When slowly, our conversation drifted towards Facebook and its IPO (initial public offering) plans.
A: Dude! This is some serious shit. Facebook has grown at an unfathomable rate. $100 billion is something.
B: And now that they are going public with about 10% of their shares, they hope to raise about $5 billion initially and then go for more, leaving the older boys like Google and Yahoo far behind
C: It is an amazing success story. And to think that Mark Zuckerberg only started it less than a decade ago.
B: Yeah! And to think that it has done all this despite having the most bull-crap business idea ever.
A: You have not said anything, SL. Quite unlike you.
Me: Yahoo is still alive?
At this point our order arrived and we spent the next hour on more intellectual discussions; the awesomeness of Gunda and Loha, the two epic Kanti Shah movies starring Mithun.
And tried to explain the deep philosophical meaning of Mamata Bannerjee’s speech at the Bengal Leads podium, which, I must tell you, is a 10-minute long monologue that questions, not just every lecture of Geography you ever attended in school/college, but your very existence on this Earth.
But the earlier deliberation did give me something to ponder over. Especially the lines where a friend described Facebook as having the, and I quote “most chutiyap agenda”.
What really is Facebook? It started out as a place where people could interact with their group of friends.
But slowly it turned into the local tea stall and then worse. And the way the number of users is growing, it may not be far when the whole world will be on Facebook.
Maybe this is what the Mayans meant when they foretold the end of the world since once addicted to Facebook, most humans usually tend to have no life.
Let us analyze the basic agenda of Facebook.
Is it a site that provides you information and helps you complete assignments, like Wikipedia? No.
Is it the largest search engine that can locate anything and bring it to you, like Google? No.
Is it..? No. No and No. That is No for every damn question, you fucking retard.
I apologize, that was my split personality, talking to me.
Anyway, coming back to the point at hand, Facebook can be best termed as an over-hyped forum where the sacred concept of privacy has become alien ever since the launch of the subscription option.
But then the question remains, why and how did it manage to grow at this ungodly rate? For this, we are to blame and so is our need to be noticed.
Since the time of it’s creation, Facebook has become a monster that feeds on our fears and obsessions. Like it or hate it, it has changed us in any way:-
For a regular Joe or Jane, flaunting the number of friends on Facebook makes them cool. It gives you a sense of belonging and the illusion that you are more popular than you actually are.
It is a hangout place where you know a lot of people but still know no one.
It has changed the way we think and does something.
We are a bit attention crazy, that I won’t deny, but Facebook has taken that trait and given it a new dimension.
Now, everything has to be posted on Facebook and we are impatient for “Likes”.
And more than that, it has changed the way we speak, introducing a whole new set of jargon.
Facebook gives you nothing to do and still provides you with a way to kill time.
People can sit still, staring at the slider that shows updates.
And I have known people who were always paranoid that, someone might have attacked them or their plants might have dried up in some stupid game.
It is the most effective tool in a stalker’s arsenal. Not only most of your thoughts public, but the subscribers and friends can also see what you like and who do you talk to more.
Sharing of Facebook passwords between two love birds is now akin to making love.
It is the test of your trust and faith in your companion, no matter that your private space goes for a toss. And if you don’t share, you know you will have a one-way ticket to splits-villa.
In this age, when people are divided with more than distances, maybe Facebook was launched with the good intentions of bringing people closer.
But instead of that, the ill-made agenda has ensured the opposite.
And now as public money will be invested to further feed the ceaseless appetite of this monster, one can not help but compare Facebook to the various chit fund company scams.
Where the investors feel good initially, but in the long run, they realize that they had been taken for a ride.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin is playing his tune, and we are following him like rats in a trance.
