Why I have 'unfriended' Facebook after seven years
I have ended my marriage with Facebook. And I am prepared for a new, post-divorce identity.
For almost six to seven years, the social-networking site has bewitchingly held me captive in its walled garden. Like its millions of spouses, called users in market jargon, I too constructed a life, a world around its news feeds, timelines, statuses and what not.
But this May, I broke up with Facebook, amicably. But there's a gritty backstory to this split.
Promoted globally as a symbol of free speech, the platform now bears little resemblance to reality. Free speech isn't synonymous with lies. Nor does it mean twisting and tweaking the truth for a bunch of likes, or, worse, for promoting social hate, covertly or overtly.
Unfortunately, that's what has been playing up on my FB over the past couple of years.
"Why should I subjugate myself to this constant bombardment of propaganda emanating from organised forces?" I asked myself last month. "Am I not rendering my original thinking vulnerable to infectious disinformation?" I wondered. This inquisitiveness quickly helped me discover the goggles through which I had been looking at Facebook.
And when I removed them, I instantly realised the social site, along with its siblings, is anything but freedom. I am not a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist.
But I think our faculties have their own capabilities and limitations. Why should I expose them to a barrage of distortions that have invaded the free-for-all networking? Why should I allow my own thoughts to be virtually road-rolled?
Facebook's promiscuity with campaigners of hate and bigotry, or reverse, has tilted the balance disproportionately in favour of what I earlier described as organised forces.
In the present climate of sectarianism, these forces, emboldened as they are for reasons they know better, act as lynch mobs ready to set themselves upon dissent.
They appear to be working full time on Facebook as agents of statecraft, manipulating public opinion, mostly by insulting or intimidating any opposition publicly.
It's not freedom.
It seems Facebook too is losing its battle against online bigotry that has apparently left many of its addicts intellectually impotent.
Many of them aren't able to think independently or stay original. They have lost their identity, their individuality.
Claims of global connectivity aside, people alienate themselves from themselves when they fabricate what doesn't exist in their real lives or society.
For now, I am glad I walked out on this la-la land. My move surely won't hurt Mark Zuckerberg's venture, but it will give some oxygen to my natural thinking. By the way, it already is.