Do not smoke they said. I said fine. Never do drugs. I said yes of course never. Never drink alcohol. I crossed my fingers and said yeah. No one said anything to me about Facebook.
The rage of social networking sites hit me in the junior year when I was hooked onto Orkut and took extensive pains creating my profile, putting in all the info with intense quality control and, I have mixed feelings as I say this, my circle of friends grew. I even bumped online with some long-lost people who were now on my ‘Friend’ list. Gradually Orkut expanded it’s umbrella and became more flexible in usage. People began to use it as a dating engine and two friends of mine (wonder why all this happens to my friends and never to me!) found their potential match on Orkut. In one case the potential wasn’t strong enough to drive the current and it went phut!
That being that, 2 years later I was sitting at my friends place in Andheri, which used to be my weekend getaway, when I saw him logon to Facebook. It was a totally cluttered website with too much information to fathom in one glance. If Orkut was a showroom, this was a warehouse. Stickers, notes, maps, quotes, gifts, trivia, ads, red boxes, white boxes, yellow boxes. It was as if Ronald McDonald had thrown up after eating a box full of crayons. Finding what you were looking for was like an Illuminati Trail and there was no Robert Langdon. In all, it was confusing. I was also told that this wasn’t for Indians i.e if you live in India. If you are in US, that’s a different matter altogether. The inability to understand the logic and messiness of the site got me hooked. And the occasional lack of work in Schlumberger helped. I joined the network, went through the ritual of filling the info, imported contacts and I was in.
If the intrigue got me hooked, the search reeled me in. I went to every box, fiddled around, moved it and at the end of to days I was bored. I rarely logged in again but that was until I moved to US for my studies. Here the network was so widespread that if it had been prevalent over 50 years back Roosevelt and Hitler had been on each other’s friend list. The US Constitution should add an annex to it’s free speech clause about the liberty to post at anyone’s wall. People from all age group are active on it. I once went to a friend’s graduation party and later that night I got friend requests from her mom and her aunt! Let alone people, even dogs have facebook accounts. But I’am sure they would just pee on a laptop if they saw one. It must be the owners.
Over time the clutter was taken out too and the interface became much more simpler. The population here was too much active. So much so that Facebook recently changed it’s “What are you doing now” to “What’s on your mind”. That makes more sense since when you are logged onto facebook, chances are that you have pretty much nothing else to do.
As I kept bumping into people around campus the parting question would often be “Are you on Facebook?” and thence on a single face to face stumble would grow more personal. Facebook has become like an obsessive-compulsive disorder for me. I sometimes even clean up my wall to make it look like less used! Even while writing this blog I must’ve logged in 20 times at the least.
Initially I was just involved with it. Now I’am totally committed. It’s like the egg and ham breakfast. The chicken was involved, but the pig, my dear friend, was totally committed.
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