Me, Myself and I

It’s my 4th Twitter birthday today or TwBirthday, to be exact. I only remember the occasion because I received a greeting from the website twbirthday.com notifying me of the same. For a person who at last count had about 1350 followers, usually rants about traffic, talks about music, posts about cocktails and rarely has the energy to upload the kind of interesting pictures that the world seems to be clicking and Instagramming at an alarming rate; this, by my own admittance, is no mean feat. And I’m strangely and shamefully proud of it. The increasing ticker of my follower count is a source of pride considering how little I contribute to the social universe out there. At least when compared to the proses, info, news and speeches people manage to condense in 140-characters. I wonder how they find time to juggle their day jobs with their online duties cos my work seem to come in the way of such things.

Don’t misinterpret my hostility. It’s not passive aggressiveness either, which is my fellow columnist’s go-to description for any of my “moods”. Instead, I’m openly contemptuous towards this sudden spring of Internet Celebrities. From Twitterati’s to Instastars, a sea of unwarranted opinions and ideas seem to be forced down our throat. I have no problems with genuinely intelligent, articulate people who can hold a conversation in real life, have opinions that matter and match up to their online avatars. My grouse is with the people whose sole aim is to score brownie points by either pandering to the crowd or posing provocative pictures of themselves to gain eyeballs.

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If standing in front of a mirror and posing like a duck with your pelvic thrust forward and your lips puckered into a pout for a self-clicked picture is now considered a valuable skill, then I take back my derision. Or if photographing each morsel of a dish on your table at every meal, before anyone is even allowed to eat it, and then posting it over various days after multiple filters and multiple hashtags means you are a foodie, then the rest of us clearly don’t appreciate our food enough. And since when did checking-in at every road, metro station and mall you pass on Foursquare become a status symbol?

And yet, somehow, for some inexplicable reason, such users have 10k followers and are raised high up in the invisible hierarchy of the social networking kingdom. I’m not saying I’m completely free of these addictions either. Like every other person, I too feel the need to over-share and over-post random details of my life at a whim, but I know when to draw the line. I can’t live tweet every party, dinner and gig and experience everything with my head buried into the phone rather than actually enjoying it in person.

There is a false, almost parallel world created where the rules are different and you assume an avatar not directly or completely related to your real life persona. Though it’s obviously different for people who are in the spotlight even offline, since their followers are not looking up to a faceless stranger. But before it became “cool” to be a big shot online, it was the domain of geeks. Enough jokes were made about MySpace, before the advent of Facebook, hinting at how it was a place where non-popular teens came to find friends. Or until recently, pop culture TV shows like The Big Bang Theory showed how comic book nerds lived their entire life logged on and had an inane need to “be connected”. Today, all of that has changed. Our worth is often measured in the number of retweets we get, how many people follow our page or the amount of heart shaped likes we get on our photos. Mediocracy is no longer a barrier and coupled with our deep-rooted need to be accepted, it has given rise to a generation of new-age celebrities.

The foremost of them is the Twitterati, now an acceptable term in the Oxford Dictionary, which describes them as – keen or frequent users of the social media website Twitter – are not only dictating social norms and doing good by trending conscientious issues, but also causing enough harm to raise eyebrows. A friend and Twitter addict with strong opinions has often been the subject of malice from other users and was recently even accused of harassment by a female user for disagreeing with her on a subject and responding sarcastically. Now people who know him in real life get his sense of dry humour, but someone online can easily misconstrue it as a personal attack, which is exactly what happened. In fact, a report was filed and it took much convincing on our part before the lady in question agreed to drop the charges.

In a similar case that made news, a recently implicated TV journalist filed an FIR with a magistrate against unknown persons who posted ‘nasty tweets using fake profiles to defame him in personal and professional life’. It’s a ridiculous claim, which the Economic Offences Wing previously ignored but it has still been filed due to the archaic provisions of Section 66 (A) of the IT Act – a popular tool used by the Government to suppress public opinion.

A dangerous trend and perhaps a sign of what could happen if you ruffle the wrong feathers, this new presence doesn’t come without its consequences. And while fake followers are not an unknown phenomenon, the possibility of being implicated for sending out the drunk text equivalent of a tweet is not a happy situation. Where is the unlike button when you need it...

From the April 2013 issue of FHM India.