Let's Not Forget To Stay Real In This Virtual World

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

We often talk about the impact of social media in our lives, good or bad, but no one can deny, its strong.

It seemed like a boon when Orkut entered our lives and we got connected to our long lost friends. That feeling actually cannot be expressed in words because though we had mobiles to stay connected, Orkut gave us a chance to get in touch with those whom at a point we hesitated to talk even.

The Crush whom you didn’t ever tell your feelings, that topper of the class which was otherwise termed to be egoist and many like them whom otherwise you never connected to but these social sites have you a chance to do so.

And then Facebook entered our lives with more professional and infectious features. Right from long distance childhood friends to relatives to neighbours (whom you hardly even know) , Colleagues and every other person close or far is a part of friend list.

So over all everyone amongst them secretly peeps in our lives. But still we are very comfortable with sharing everything we feel , we have , we desire, we will have on the FB platform.

Likes and comments are our energy boosters. After every new post our eyes gets stuck at notification and thus the social media platform successfully crushes the social network.

Not only this but the real emotions are too replaced by emoticons. This really makes me laugh many times and often it makes me think how far we have come in terms of relationships and real emotions.

Specially when there’s something very serious and people comfortably share on platform with not only an emotional statement but also adding emoticons to it.

I feel the words, the depth of sadness one is going through, I feel the emptiness but the moment it is shared with added emoticons all that feel about the pain is lost. This is completely a personal point of view but I feel emoticons are not the way to express the grief or sadness.

Yes they do convey something funny , someone trying to show they are angry but aren’t in real, Someone trying to say thanks with a smile and kiss but not the sadness.

The other day while talking to my friend who is going through a bitter face in life, I felt really sad for her. We talked for hours and I tried to comfort her and tried my best to make her feel positive. She felt good after talking and listening to me. I too felt good that I could help her and boost her up.

At night she again felt lonely and wanted to chat. I had to make my baby sleep but I still thought of helping her through online chat. We started talking , as usual I started calming her down with positive words of appreciations and emotions and then I received her reply, “ Hey dear I am really sad and hurt 😢😩😩”

The moment I saw these emoticons along, all that pain, all that sadness that I thought she was carrying suddenly felt doomed and I realized these emoticons are eating up the real feel of the phase she actually is going through.

I stopped myself from judging her but somewhere I felt she needed to grow up a bit more.

Either the emotions these days are actually replaced by these emoticons or it’s me who isn’t able to associate myself into these social networking platforms for emotions.

Yes, the impact surely is huge now there’s no more real fights but unfriending and unfollowing, no more real ignoring but blocking, no more emotional disconnection but removing the person from the group.

Some celebrity leaves the world and instead of understanding the pain his or her family is going through we start pouring comments and expect their families to immediately revert back, forgetting they too are humans like us.

If some famous people don’t react online on any subject we think they don’t bother and we start analyzing them.

We think condolences expressed on social media is more important than the real feelings one is going through.

We forget to understand the actual situation, the right thing, the sensitivity of the issue and start judging everyone according to his or her social media activeness.

What a virtual world we are in, all our real emotions are reflected online and we are just controlled by the artificial judgement of people.

We need to learn many things and understand the depth of emotions and reality. We have to start behaving sensibly and responsibly by acting the right way to use social media as a medium to get and stay connected to the world , so that the distance is minimized, not to make it a platform of expressing and understanding the emotions in a way to increase the distance between relationship.

Let’s learn to stay connected by understanding each other in real not virtual!

Sarita Shukla is a Graduate in Microbiology and MBA in HR, currently staying in Navi Mumbai. She is a proud Homemaker and mom to two naughty, cute little boys. Writing is her passion and blogging gave her a wonderful way to fulfil it. She writes Quotes, Captions, short stories and blogs right from her personal experiences, current topics, to the stories. Many of her stories won on various online platforms. She is a passionate writer and reader. 

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are the personal views of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mom Store