Wednesday 27 June 2012

Like this!

What actually bugs me a lot is this game of "likes" on Facebook. 50 likes, 100 likes and the latest benchmark created by this random friend (whom I didn't know existed until, well, today). She had 240 likes on her display picture. Seriously? To be frank, that picture was not even so great. The photo was probably taken from a Blackberry Curve phone (I have this incredible talent to tell what camera was used to take a certain picture, call it the photographer's eye). Some minor editing, airbrushed to perfection and bam, 240 likes in 4 hours of upload. I'm usually not bothered about the likes someone else gets; but let's be honest, if we got that kind of "liking", we would be happy souls too. Today, though, it got on my nerves. I thought I should get to the bottom of this. I went to her profile and saw she had 1,040 friends. That moment, I got rid of all my irritation. When I joined Facebook in 2009, I was naive and there was this sort of competition to add as many people on Facebook as you could. The more friends one had, the more of a status they got. At a point I had 563 virtual friends. Very recently did I realize that I was a fool to have done that. I had to take the pain of deleting almost half of them, and a few whom I just didn't like. I had a couple of friends who said that having those many people on the list was not a big deal, but I was firm about getting rid of people whom I didn't know/like. I mean, isn't Facebook about "friends"? We add "friends", not "people-you-might-know-or-might-have-seen"!




Coming back to that girl. She had 1,040 friends. Obviously, she would get those many likes. Some of the "likes" must have happened accidentally, some might have liked it in a sarcastic manner, and only a very minor portion would have actually, genuinely, "liked" the picture. Its not just about clicking that one button - one must actually think that the picture is worth a like. I know I must seem like I'm making a big deal out of this, but seriously, I feel its time for people to rise above the vicious circle of "likes". Its slightly depressing to see girls put up statuses and self-obsessed pictures that scream "LIKE THIS THING PLEASE!". I am guilty of having done it myself, but good brains dawned upon me eventually. And thank god for that!