Aim. Shoot. Post.

 Why are you on Facebook? Why do you care who is trending? Did you miss your 15 minutes of fame? Van Morrison.

My participation in social media is negligible. I post my weekly blog on Facebook and Twitter and on occasion, I might make the odd comment, odd being the operative word, if some of my ‘friends’ happened to post something that I found particularly relevant or interesting. Other than that, zilch would be an apposite word to describe my contribution to these vehicles that so intensely involve and engage millions of people all over the world. At this point, I can faintly detect in the offing, a few of my readers bristling at what they might wrongly assume is a condemnation of social media and their active role in it. Or should that have been ’in them’? I have never quite come to grips with whether the word media should be treated as singular or plural. The singular medium or the plural media, if you get my drift. In such dodgy circumstances, I just go with the flow.

Leaving that grammatical conundrum to one side, in re: my imagined condemnation of the social media multitudes, perish the thought. I admire the amount of trouble people take to tell us all about their daily rounds of duties and concerns, their food habits and eateries visited, the music they lean towards, oftentimes breaking into song themselves, their travel plans, their pet hobbies as well as their pets and so much more. The downside is that a ghastly road accident becomes a target for instant clicking and posting, never mind extending a helping hand. Above all, politics. That is when biases, bile and invective combine in an incendiary way to give us agnostic, disinterested readers, some well-earned, if dubious, entertainment. Twitter is usually the vehicle of choice for verbal abuse. Therefore, I may not be an active participant, but I do commend the assiduous participation of people of all ages and denominations in social media, per se. Free speech and all that guff. More power to your shoulders.

As I spend on average, about 30 minutes or so browsing through Facebook, Instagram or Twitter every day, I have been able to arrive at some kind of categorisation of the posts that most engage social media freaks. I had already mentioned some of these heads, but I felt it would be an interesting exercise to elaborate on them, such that we get a more rounded feel for what confronts us on a daily basis. By no means a comprehensive list, I have merely cherry-picked a few that interest me. Now that Mark Zuckerberg has announced the launch of Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, taking Twitter head-on, there is much frisson in the air. Elon Musk is having kittens and is threatening legal action claiming infringement of copyright or similar. Let battle commence. Seconds out of the ring, first round, go for it chaps and hit below the belt.

The Travellers.

Indians are now arguably the most peripatetic race in the world. They are everywhere. Or in the words of that memorable Beatles hit song, Here, There and Everywhere. Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Far East, the Silk Route, the Middle East and, come to that, even the North Pole. The Indian footprint spreads far and wide and is as firmly etched on diverse soils as the mythical Yeti’s. Which, of course, means photo ops galore. In earlier times, we would lug our Canons, Pentaxes, Yashicas or Leicas and take careful aim at the Leaning Tower, the Pyramids, Sydney Opera House, the Niagara Falls, the Eiffel Tower, the Tower Bridge, Machu Picchu, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and so on and so forth. Yank out the completed roll of film and hand it over to the nearest developer and in two shakes of a duck’s tail, you will be poring over the glossy or matt prints with your near and dear ones. Plenty of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs.’

All that has changed now. We live in an instant world. Your mobile phone is your camera. Correction. Your camera is your mobile phone. Click away till you are blue in the face and keep posting for instant consumption by your publics, on Facebook and Instagram. That’s you standing next to the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen. That’s me sitting on a log somewhere in the dense Black Forest waving my trusty alpenstock. That’s you again standing next to the lovable 400-year-old Mannekin Pis (the Pissing Boy) bronze statue in Brussels, and that’s all of us biting into a juicy sirloin steak at Angus Steak House in Piccadilly Circus. The waiter took the picture. And hang on, is that Jeremy Irons walking past in Leicester Square? Shall I run and get a selfie? It’s not Jeremy Irons? Aw shucks! 257 responses in less than 3 hours. Mostly emojis, hearts, smileys and kisses. If you are a foreigner (as opposed to an Indian), you will be doing the same thing in front of the Taj Mahal, the silvery beaches in Goa or the Madurai Meenakshi temple.

The posts I really marvel at are the ones where the traveller takes a picture of himself or herself in the plane, making sure the backdrop clearly establishes he or she (or both) are swanning it in Business Class. Or even First Class. Raise a flute of Dom Perignon. Cheers! Then there’s the airline route map. Or flight path. Oh, the flight path! That is an absolute must. Just taking off from Mumbai. In nine hours, we will be landing at Heathrow. Will click and post the London skyline. After eight plus hours, London approaching, gradual descent. No skyline. No Houses of Parliament. No Thames snaking through the city. Only clouds. See the clouds! These are London clouds that rain on Wimbledon’s parade! Bye for now, rushing off to Customs and Baggage Claims. Will post pictures from the black cab. Bye for the next forty minutes. That is so cruel. His family and friends having to wait for an agonising forty minutes.

Eating out.

 Why so many social media devotees should be dying to know what you are eating on a daily basis is a matter for deep contemplation. Philosophers have said that you are what you eat, but still. Must we be subjected day after day, to photographs of restaurants visited and mouth-watering snaps of every dish ordered from soup to nuts, the wine list, and naturally, a close-up of the label of the exotic wine of choice, rounding it all off with the dessert? Othello’s envious green-eyed monster roils my innards. Many even helpfully post a picture of the invoice so we know the damage incurred. On balance, if one were contemplating a culinary binge abroad, this is useful. Less ambitious folk in India are also happy to share with us the refined art of making curd rice at home and how not to screw up the delicate business of cooking up a storm with tomato rasam and the Kerala special, the mixed veg avial. Yum, yum. A short film of the entire procedure is de rigueur. Bon appetit!

Let’s have a sing-song.

 Never mind what your choice of music might be, it’s all there on Facebook, Instagram or even WhatsApp. From precocious three-year old toddlers to spavined octogenarians, and every age group in-between, we are all closet warblers. And now, we are all coming out of the closet, in a manner of speaking, technology helping out with the pre-recorded background soundtrack. From Hindi and Tamil film songs of yesteryear, western pop hits of The Carpenters or Engelbert Humperdinck, Carnatic ‘hits’ like Vatapi Ganapatim or for that matter the infantile Geetham, Vara veena mrudu paani, a ghazal or thumri thrown in, if that is your bag – there is no end to it. Even your pet dog is encouraged to howl a few canine notes! All of it captured on your mobile for posterity, at times a pain in the posterior! I often wince with regret that we did not have mobile cameras fifty years ago, else many of our musical exploits would have been preserved for us to admire nostalgically, but after ‘giving me excess of it’ (to slightly paraphrase the Bard), I am not so sure. It might have been too much of a good thing.

The Twitterati.

 Look, there is quite a bit of sensible and sensitive chat that takes place on Twitter, but you will have to search very hard to find it. Needle in a haystack. Mostly, it is dominated by trolls and bots, political mud-slinging, engineered by the rival parties themselves. Even observations on sports personalities can get pretty ugly. This freedom granted to us to punch in pretty much what we want without let or hindrance, and repent at leisure, is a curse that has come upon us, as Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott might have put it. Those who would have found writing a 300-word essay with a fountain pen on a foolscap sheet of paper a gargantuan struggle, now fancy themselves as a latter-day Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. With due apologies to those two literary titans. For the most part, the posts are so full of bile and borderline toilet banter that it barely merits a second glance. So much so that the bitterness is spilling over into our drawing and dining rooms. Friends become foes overnight, and the idea of what is ‘politically correct’ to talk about or not has undergone a sea change. Better to simply sit back and sing a song, out of key.

Twitter? Speaking for myself, it is strictly for the birds. As former American basketball pro Charles Barkley put it pithily, ‘Social media is where losers go to feel important.’ He might have had an axe to grind and is probably guilty of making a sweeping generalisation, but one can see where he is coming from.