Last week, a 20 year old young lad from
Coimbatore committed suicide because he wasn't able to see Vijay's
movie, Thalaiva, on the day of the release. Usually, the death of a
person is reason to mourn. But this time, It was more of disgust.
Three reasons -
- Why would someone kill themselves over someone who they have no emotional bond with?
- Why would someone kill themselves over something which will constitute just 3 hours of their life?
- Why would someone kill themselves at all?
What was the reason behind the young man
taking such a drastic decision over a movie? Was he proving himself
to be a “true fan”? Or was he just an idiot?
Nowadays, celebrity fandom is at an
unimaginable high . The more one thinks of it, Social Media is the
dominant reason for this. How? Let's try to think this out.
The humankind mimics, by nature. We humans
subconsciously mimic when we are in a conversation with an
individual, especially if they share similar interests. This is done
to empathize with the speaker or the social circle or the community
at large. What is to be noted is that an individual mimics through
social interaction. In today's era, where social media is mightier
than a pen or sword, the interaction is significantly more. People
follow one another on twitter, actively argue on fan pages on
Facebook and more often than not, push oneself over the edge.
10 years ago, when Social Media was in its
embryonic stage and Internet was still in making its transition from
from Dial-Up to Broadband, social interaction was restricted to one's
actual social circle. No, not the Google + circles. People used to
discuss on any topic within their circle, and the possibility of the
discussion spreading across other similar groups, or going viral, was
extremely remote.
Fast forward 10 years, Social Media plays
the cruel parasite which has the power to not just spread any
discussion to numerous social circles, but to twist, mutate and shape
shift in ways the reciever wants to concieve. Chinese whisper on the
web, if you may. Celebrities more often than not play the role of an
Epiparasite. And we humans, play the hosts to the parasitic ambitions
of Social Media. The idea is very similar to that of Meme Theory.
Everytime, a new major movie is up for
release we see the twitterati explode with millions of tweets on how
the movie is either going to be orgasmically good or it's going to be
an insult to the intelligence of the masses. It is perfectly fine for
someone to express their opinion on Social Media. But being the
parasitic hosts we are, we feed these ideas onto other similar hosts
(read retweets, shares, likes etc). Once the parasitic infection
reaches a given level where it becomes “cool”, mimicking springs
into action. People who may not even be remotely interested in being
a part of the menagerie to begin with are sucked into it.
Just as this blog was being written, Sachin Tendulkar
tweeted something about his support of the MARD initiative. Fair
enough. The disheartening part of all this is the tweets by his so
called fans. Tweets like “God is back to twitter”, “I joined
twitter only to check Sachin's tweets”, “OMG, Sachin is here. My
day has been made” etc were a dime a dozen. The last I checked,
there was just 1 tweet supporting the Initiative as compared to 10
random, meaningless tweets? Needless to say, it is quite unnecessary.
The weeks leading upto Chennai Express's
release,it was a pain looking at my TL and FB wall. It was either fans going gaga
over SRK's brilliance or how it will be the worst movie in the
history of the planet. Similar was the case before the release (Or
Non-Release) of Thalaiva. There was this one section of Vijay “fans”
bickering about how they will watch the movie FDFS and watch it n
number of times. When the news of its non-release spread, there were
innumerable tweets/posts about how people won't watch any other movie till
its release.
The human mind is tweaked in a way that it
accepts and processes information that is readily accessible,
regardless of its credibility. With a freeflow of not particularly
sensible information on Social Media, our minds are subconsciously
filled with what we see (Oh, she had this dessert at xyz, it looks
so yummy, I wanna eat it too) or what we read (Oh, he is reading the
Homer’s Illiad, what a pretentious douche) to what we engage in
(Let me spam this page with racial slurs and sit back and enjoy the
backlash) . It has come to a point where we fail to distinguish
between what to embrace and what to ignore.
Let us not forget that social media is a
wonderful tool to stay in touch with people and establish contacts,
participate in healthy discussions over controversial matters and
receive new perspectives of people whom you might have never even
met. All we are saying is that when you post a status asking the 800
friends on your list (quarter of which you don’t know personally)
“what should I eat for dinner?”, what makes you think anyone
cares. You might argue that people got back to you on that post. Some
suggesting what you can eat, others might’ve listed the dishes on
their three-course meal and an odd one or two would’ve politely
asked you to sod off.
All we are saying here is that use the tools
to make something constructive or at least amusing. If you take them
and bash them against one another then all you make is noise and that
my dear, adds chaos in the cosmos.
PS: Thanks to +Bhavya Sharma for helping me make some sense out of this blog.
