How Social Sites are downplaying our standing– pessimist personal thoughts.
My love affairs with the internet started with the exuberant flirtation with Geocities when I was a little kid. When I was a teen, I started blogging and creating my own stuffs. In 2009, Geocities showed me the real world of internet when they shut down their website. I realized how the world of internet is a house made of cards. You never know when your landlord is going to give you 24 hour notification of house collapse and you have to exit it no matter how impossible it is to take all those stuffs out from there. It was a moment of realization of mistrust to the virtual world for me at that time. It was also an emotional attachment and failure to understand the functional and structural deviant of internet progress. They are not a free stuff and their failure to outsmart their expectation can also lead to the chain reaction of dissatisfaction to customers or users like me on the other end. This adds to the impending danger of loss of personal content in the time when certain internet component fails to continue the service. Letting the customer transfer or download the content might be somehow a right thing but there is always an emotional side to this.
My personal life was deeply involved with the Facebook phenomenon since 2007. To be honest Facebook became an integral part of life. Although I knew that it was not the only method of getting connected with friends, I was already submerged in its swamp. There was a phase of infatuation with Facebook, and a subliminal love and matured relationship. I emotionally invested heavily on Facebook by using its free service* to the fullest extent. Every important conversation online with my love, family and social circle was in my inbox. My inbox was filled with the inspirational message from my girlfriend, and my family. My social circle and my organizations iam in used it in a best way of communicating with each other and I was learning this phenomenon to the best through every meeting decisions sent to my inbox when I was unable to attend them. Every trip I made had its imprint on Facebook. The photos and the link were another part of attachment. The narcissistic status I updated since 2007 is the representation of me since that time. There is a huge success story, behind creating a high school fan page I went in my childhood abroad, after getting permission from the school authority. They were able to start a scholarship fund for other students. This is only a chunk of exuberance I was getting from facebook. Its application base, the like phenomenon, groups, and many more were making me a facebook addict. This addiction and facebook love affairs came to a halt when they mysteriously* suspended my account last Saturday. I wrote an email to them, but couldn’t get any reply till today except the automated email they sends to everyone whose account has been suspended. This facebook fiasco has added a feeling of emotional loss within myself. Will I be able to get my content back? The prose my girlfriend composed for me? The blessing my brother send in my inbox, the birthday message my sister sent? Those photos which are exclusively in facebook and are important to me personally for many reasons? How about those thousands of fans of whom iam the only sole messenger of our organization? How about my standing as a whole? Truly, it was my personal diary. Most of my friends whom I don’t communicate through phone might have thought I have blocked them and much more? I know I might have added some extra character in my name, poked my school’s girl friends or added some people whom I had never meet and made some group bashing something. But this is real me and this is how human beings are. They have a heritage and language which might not be solely represented by English username, so they tend to express it. I never thought of backing those things because of the silly thought that facebook account is mine and it won’t be taken away from me without notification.
But I was wrong to trust something in virtual. I failed to learn from the Geocities debacle. Facebook has its own limits and rules. It does not particularly care person like me when its algorithm tells them this user id 123456 has been using facebook more often than what it is supposed to be in normal condition. Will I ever upload photos in flickr instead of keeping them in my hard drive? Will I keep every email on gmail undeleted? Will I use blogger and wordpress as my personal diary and journal? Will I be trusting the Chrome OS and use it? I don’t know. To the most part all we are subjugated to trust and use the services in internet and we tend to do so, no matter how some of our emotional attachment and social standing are left unaddressed.
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To be continued.