Facebook social networking brought big change in the world of socialization. In our last anniversary, my wife wished me “Happy Marriage Anniversary” in facebook. After receiving the facebook message in office, I was in a dilemma whether I should send a facebook message in response or call her to wish her the same and admit that I forgot the day. On one hand, all these socialization sites like facebook make the world very small by bringing the people across the globe on a single platform and on the other hand, it causes people to move away from conventional communication.
I still remember my childhood days. There were not many Televisions in our locality. And hence many people used to come to our home to watch popular sports or movie. So, the television indirectly became a platform for social networking.
I was born and brought up in Kolkata, India. Durga Puja is the main festival to us i.e. the Bengalee. On the last day of the Puja, there is a ritual that people go to their relative’s or friend’s house to offer respects to the elders and strengthen friendship with those of the same age. We used to be pretty busy in this period of time (which spans across a week) to visit other houses or at home. But nowadays, we don’t visit any house and instead, we leverage the facebook social networking platform to perform this ritual. Except three of my cousins, no one visit our house nowadays. And I am afraid that they will also avoid doing so, once they will start using the facebook social networking platform. Literally, we have made this age old ritual a virtual one.
We are all running in high speed in this fast world. In this fast moving world, where we don’t have enough time to socialize, Facebook social networking is a viable option. And it gives us the flexibility to stay connected with everyone, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. I believe that mobile phone is the first revolutionary invention in this area (keeping aside pager for the time being as Pager didn’t get the familiarity as that of mobile phone). With the invention of mobile phone, we could overcome the pain of staying away from our near and dear ones. We got the world in our hand with the invention of mobile phone. But parallely, we lost our privacy. We became reachable at all time over mobile phone, whether we do like it or not. And then the other socialization platform came in the name of Orkut, My Space, Facebook, Google Plus, Tweet etc. All these sites provided us the platform to disseminate information in lightning speed to the entire set of people associated with us. It helped the people to keep themselves up to date to the relevant information round the clock. But this has happened in sacrifice of all other mode of communication. I have given an illustration to prove this point in the beginning. So going forward, don’t be surprised if you are attending a session on communication and the topic mainly revolves around facebook social networking.
Now, the big question is what kept in future for us? Beyond our business and office, will we be only encompassed in facebook social netwokring? Though we don’t have any definite answer for this question, we are slowly inching towards the same. If you ask someone, what do you like a) get together\hangout with friends or b) online facebook social networking; the answer may be get together\hangout. But our lifestyle, lack of free time and fast life may not allow us to do the same. So people would like to leverage facebook social networking platform to take a flavor of hangout(socialization). Even if it doesn’t satisfy 100% of your need, it will fulfill at least 50%. We exactly don’t know what will be the next to FaceBook. But whatever it is, you will move forward one step toward complete virtualization.
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