And by GAL, I mean GET. A. LIFE.
Now this might come to readers as a direct attack on those who uphold the view that social media is not for expression of emotions, but let me make my stance clear enough here.
A person whom I encountered upheld the view that social media are not for expression of emotions, as it makes the person making these expressions look vulnerable. Direct quote from her post : for social desirability, you can choose to deceive or you can choose to stay away from it !
No. No. NO. A THOUSAND TIMES NO.
With all due respect, there has to be some form of emotional expression at some point. We can't just go on making statements which as as cold, dark and grey as the current British weather. We can't go about deceiving others. And we obviously can't be going all Sunshiney-Happy-Land all the time, if that's the picture we want to portray to the public.
I am a sort-of hardcore Twitter user, and I hardly ever touch Facebook. I have YouTube and I use it regularly enough. Now, seriously, as I said several months back, pardon me if I can't make a mind-engaging discussion, because the only part of humanity that I can appeal to is the heart.
Let's keep it real here. Each person has his vulnerabilities. Organisations have their downtimes. I firmly believe many people will uphold my view : we're not on Twitter to gain cheap publicity, but respect from the many followers we might have. Or if not, we'd at least want constancy from our friends. Respect comes with a high price. If you want others to respect you, you have to tell them things as they are. If I'm tired and I can't work on something because of my fatigue, I'd say it. If I'm irritated, sometimes angered, by a malfunctioning app and I can't go on with what I'm supposed to do, I'd say it. Because people are anticipating changes from me. It might be a letdown, but only a temporary one. At the end of the day, even with a minor emotional setback you still get to reap the fruits of your efforts. It's much better than saying "It's in progress, it's in progress", but in reality it takes several months, even years to finish it.
What we say in normal sentences also reflects some emotional expression. Here's the irony of it : the writer of that post actually made her emotions pretty visible in her tweets. It's hypocritical to say that social media isn't for emotional expression because we aren't robots. We react to things.
Followers and friends can be an impatient lot. If you've proven your worth to them, yes, they can afford to wait for perhaps a longer period. But if you're just about to flex your muscles and you fail to tell them how things are, or if you fail to speak to them with a sense of emotion, with a sense of humanity, they'd just be turned off... and you fall, fall, fall, into nothingness.
Let me put it on record that social media, like any other medium, are not to be used for direct, personal attacks. I've been through such incidents and I don't wanna go through them again. We're not talking slander here.
Twitter used to ask the question "What are you doing ?". Now, they changed it to "What's happening ?" Whilst a whole lot of possibilities are opened with the latter question, many of us use the old formulation. These tweets of ours tend to be emotion-filled, even with small letters. But that's what people are looking for - the human touch. If, say, a person whom I follow happens to have had a bad day and he tells us about it, it's the human touch we're looking for, not his vulnerability.
Of course, we're not expected to go "I am happy" or "I am sad", unless we are speaking in Hymmnos. If we're not tweeting along the lines of "Was yea ra" or "Was au gaya", these emotional tweets can and will look cheesy and superficial. But emotion is a key part of humanity, and social media are created for humanity, and not vice versa. To take out the emotional bit from social media is to make a mockery of the whole community of users.
And no, if I am expected to mince my words here just because I've hurt some readers' sentiments, no, I shall not do it. I have an integrity to keep !
See also :
Wrong Channel
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