Kitchen Knife vs Social Media — Part 1
Tags: Kids, Human Behavior, Social Media, Technology, Messaging

Context

This post is a continuation of previous post . In that post I shared how in an active whatsapp group, suddenly conversation died and reached to zero engagement. Its almost 2 weeks to that event and traffic on that group is still not any where near to earlier level.

What caused this ?

Its a complex problem. There are many reasons which leads to such situations, where a group of adults stop talking with each other. Much of it is do with social conditioning. but there is a technological aspect to this problem ,which I want to write about in this post,

(I do believe s/w can help in social aspect as well, but that discussion is not for this post).

Kitchen Knife vs Social Media

Kitchen knife and social media share some common traits.

Let’s start with kitchen knife .

We all use kitchen knife. Its a tool which we use day in and day out.Something which we can not deal without. Its a necessity. Kitchen knife I use looks something like this. (image taken from google).

I also have a 9 yr old daughter. Few years back when she was a toddler, she expressed interest in the cutting vegetables. Now at her age at that time(~3/4 yrs), the knife shown above was not a good tool for her.

So my wife bought an age appropriate knife for her. Something like following (image taken from amazon). She was happy and safe.

After 1 (or 2 years ) she got an upgrade. But still not something similar to the knife we were using, but quite close. (image from amazon)

So she is slowly preparing her self for graduating to use a bigger and real kitchen knife.

While this transition was going on, she also observed something else. She witnessed grown ups cutting their finger while chopping onion or lettuce.

(image taken form a google search)

She witnessed injury and pain caused by knife and understood what it means when someone says “handle with care”.

Whats the point ?

Point I am trying to make is that by gradually adopting the tool and witnessing side effects of improper use of knife, she is better prepared for using a real kitchen knife. She will for sure have her share of accidents, but they will be less traumatic and wont influence her mood much.

What Social media has to do with it?

Most of social media users (specially the one in whatsapp group I mentioned above) are like small kids with a big and sharp kitchen knife. This is specially true in countries like India, where many people start their internet use with social media.

Most of them do not know all the features of apps they are using. They learn them while using it. Back to kitchen knife analogy, if I give a 3 yr old a big knife , for sure they will injure them self. Not only they will injure themself, they might injure sibling.

They also dont know about impact of their actions. They havent seem anyone getting impacted in -ve way due to social media. As a matter of fact , they do not realize they are getting impacted. When they understand , sometimes its too late.

They end up having traumatic experience on social media. Many of them start blaming social media for it. Which is true to some extent, but problem is more deep inside the user learning habits (thats my opinion).

What we can do ?

I will write more about this in my next post. But I hope this post helps you understand that, social media is like a knife. You need to gradually master it, other wise it will impact you and your friends. Often in a way, you may not appreciate.

Thanks for reading!