• Home
• /
• Opinion

Why do people find Facebook compelling?

Fellow crime writer and friend AS was angry with a newspaper in a distant state capital where he is a columnist (the staff is moribund and self-important). He ranted about it on Facebook. I'm not on Facebook anymore so my wife showed me his two posts. (I de-activated my account six months ago to avoid the distraction from the book I'm currently finishing up.) I was surprised, not by his fury or by the comments section that alternated between pile-ons and Schadenfreude, but by the fact he hung his dirty laundry out in public - that too in a small town, where nobody's a stranger. As it is, most of us avoid controversy because potential employers ask their HR departments to scroll through social media to check you out. We avoid the risks of an innocuous post being misconstrued for immoral or anti-national (or both) and then being arrested by a knuckle-headed cop. And we avoid letting our relatives know what we're up to.
I was wrong. At a party last weekend, a young, gung-ho wealth manager lectured me about the Facebook craze in small-town India. In the big cities Facebook is a way of staying connected with old friends, especially from school and college. But in small towns, it is among the most aspirational activities. Facebook is more vernacular than English in India. "Three hundred million already," he gasped. "Think of the monetisation possibilities."
Indian society's stratification is thus mirrored on social media. I fled Facebook also because I was turned off by its "friend suggestions" that showed ugly, old and stodgy journalists I wanted to avoid. Even uglier are the fake news posts that once sensible friends circulate. "It's the new Orkut," my wife said. I laughed until I remembered how the small-town police assassinated Aarushi Talwar's character simply because she planned "sleepovers" on Orkut. "Everyone unnecessarily announces where they are going or eating," she added, before checking her Facebook timeline for updates.
My children are not active on Facebook. My youngest, at college in the US, prefers Tumblr. My elder is a software engineer so her time is spent in a parallel coding universe; her leisure, however, is Snapchat. My niece, whose engagement is in two weeks, is obssessed with Pinterest. My son the musician avoids his phone mostly; occasionally he posts something on Instagram and Twitter, where I'm active. We collectively communicate on our family group on WhatsApp, the only such group I'm on.
It is stunning to me that anyone still finds Facebook compelling. Confirming what the wealth manager said, I had reconnected on Facebook with friends from high school and college, without adding quality to anybody's life. In fact, most embarrassing is when a friend from your youth does not accept your friend request (but accepts the request from a lesser friend). What happened? Do I even have time to wonder what happened?
As far as reconnected friends go, a dear pal from high school died this April. It was heart-breaking. We had kept in touch not on social media but on email, which was private and also lent space to converse in depth, at length. After his passing away I put up some photos of us but it seemed not to affect any of our other classmates. Perhaps they were too busy, or had their own intense times to confront, or perhaps they silently commiserated without pressing a "like" button or commenting. It's hard to say, but it goes to show how complicated we humans are - too complicated for Facebook's linear timeline.
Almost all my small-town relatives are on Facebook. My former drivers are on Facebook. A former maid, who my wife brought along to Mumbai from the plains of Assam, is on Facebook. We saw photos of her two babies. The tailor who upholstered my sofa recently is on Facebook - my wife called him and suddenly his photo showed up in her friend suggestions. In that way, Facebook is a great democrat leveller of Indian society, and a good thing too. My mother's cousin, in a village in north Bihar, married his son off and posted photos on Facebook. They were taken with a cheap cellphone and many were poorly-lit or blurred, but they served the purpose: the cousin was proud and happy to be on Facebook.
Indeed, Facebook is for most small-town Indians less sinister than the most populous social media in the country, Aadhar (Unique Identification Authority of India). Only time will tell whether or not it is actually less sinister. What is clear is that urbane English-speakers like me and my kids may not engage on Facebook, but that will hardly deter its growth in India. It is not only here to stay, it makes the social media department of any political party more important that could have been conceived in the last general election in India - way back in 2014.
As for crime writer AS, his saga ended with the newspaper terminating his column because he had dragged the institution on to social media mud-slinging. This episode alone showed the power of Facebook in small-town India.
Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist based in India