Social hyper-connectivity: A curse in disguise?

     Unlimited talk-time for local and STD calls, and abundant 4G data (2GB/day) at a price of 399 Indian rupees per month (for non-Indian friends: ~ US $ 6.5/month)! What we have witnessed in last 3-4 years is a revolution in the field of telecommunication.  If I have to go back to my childhood days, I could not have imagined the existence of something called “Cell-phone”; rather a landline connection was more than a prized possession those days.  However, things have changed remarkably over last 2-3 decades and all the 90s kids should feel lucky that they have witnessed the paradigm shift.  We have witnessed the journey from the costly landline BSNL connections to the inexpensive JIO offers, the big-fatty Beetel land phones to the slim and smart cell-phones, from “Shaktimaan” to “Game of Thrones”, from the Kodak roll-cameras to the sophisticated DSLRs, from the primitive videogames to the thrilling PlayStations, and the list goes on.  There is hardly any doubt that the technological progress has improved the quality of lives to a great extent. However, a part of my brain prompts me to believe that things are not as rosy as they appear! Is there any curse in disguise? My answer is: “YES”. Are we missing something? My answer still remains “YES”! 

     It all started with Orkut, which is now extinct, and was followed by Google plus, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Telegram (The Tinder guys do not read this sort of articles!) The ever-burgeoning social networking sites have definitely enhanced our connectivity, but is this increase in connectivity effective?  As a researcher who is working on brain connectivity in several neurological disorders, I interpret any increase in the connectivity of two regions of the brain as either a probable “cause” of the disease or a probable “effect” of the disease (compensatory response), which may or may not affect the outcome of the disease.  Now, when I extrapolate the same logic to our social hyper-connectivity that is definitely secondary to the technological innovations, I wonder how effective or how aberrant these connections have become over time.  

     It seems I have more than 1700 friends in Facebook and some of my friends have even crossed the 2000 mark! Comparing these numbers to the number of friends I had before I joined Facebook, is same as comparing the size of a mammoth to that of a moth! I still have great bonding with my pre-Facebook friends and having or not having them in my friend list in Facebook does not affect my interactions with them.  Similarly, Facebook has no contributions towards my friendship with people who I came across in post-Facebook days.  Clearly we have plenty of friends but we don’t have enough friendship.  We are just in touch with each other, but friendship actually is much more than the sham touch! There are plenty of reasons why I believe that we are facing the ill consequences of the hyper-connectivity.  To be very forthright, I feel we consume more time to display our false sense accomplishments to our sham-virtual friends in social networks than we celebrate our togetherness with the real and close friends.  In short, we are just happy with the superficial romance with mirage! Communication through chats and texts in the social networks has apparently increased our connectivity but these superficial communications have been smothering the beauty of deep conversations in real life.  Clearly, we need to distinguish “communication” from “conversation” and undoubtedly the latter holds prodigious importance in our lives carrying the tagline “I-am-too-busy”.  The aberrant hyper-connectivity has actually made us lonelier than we used to be.  We spend more time in checking others’ status updates than updating our relationships with our real-old-gold friends.  We spend more time in displaying (“sharing” for those who are unhappy with the word “displaying”) our so-called success that include foreign travels, flight check-ins, photography skills (credit goes to DSLR), selfies in exotic restaurants, and academic accomplishments (and of course this blog post!).  In other words, we are so occupied with the aberrant connections that we hardly get any time for our fundamental connections. Most of us are parts of the infected crowd and we should gradually come out of this addiction. It is time to introspect and it is high time to prioritise the connections with due respect to the age old phrase “Quality matters, not quantity!”

[P.S I have not received any honorarium from Airtel for promoting their product through 1^st sentence of this article J]