Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if Facebook doesn’t catch you, Twitter must.
Sartre, you lucky dog, sitting alone in the happily ever-after, if you were alive you would paraphrase your pithy phrase pretty fast, wouldn’t you? You would say ‘hell is other people on social media’.
Life in 2015 is very difficult for the antisocial. There’s not much grey left — you can’t pick and choose how much ‘social’ you can handle. You can no longer slapdashedly avoid some people or evade that party or skip this evening. Either you’re a hunter-gatherer, with no electricity and Internet, or you live in white light — visible, available, accountable always and to everybody.
Once upon a simpler time, if the antisocial didn’t want to answer the phone, families were told to say you were out of the country or sleeping. If you didn’t want to meet someone, you didn’t answer the doorbell. You just hid behind the sofa until whoever it was tired and went away. You skipped wedding receptions by pretending you were dangerously ill. And even if you didn’t manage to slide neatly out of the frame of all photos, you could always burn the prints later.
But overnight, my unfriendly friend, we’ve been trapped. Like helpless rabbits, we goggle in the spotlight of constant camaraderie. Now, if we don’t answer the doorbell, they stand outside and call. And when the mobile phone rings loudly behind the sofa, the game is well and truly up.
Or there you are, pretending to be dangerously ill and hiding quietly in the bedroom. A little bored, you twiddle with the phone. Well, stupid you. People have slyly sent Whatsapp messages and now all those little ticks you never noticed have become two little ticks and blue to boot. Next time you bump into Preeti in the supermarket, you’ll say you were in the ICU and couldn’t attend her housewarming bash. And she will say, in a dangerously sweet voice, ‘oh they allow cell phones into the ICU these days?’
Then there are all those competing social evenings. You decide to go to one because they nagged you the most and you tell the other inviter that you are, well, dangerously ill. Guess what? The first inviter, under that presumptuous statute of social media, will post pictures of you sitting cross-legged on the table playing ‘Pass the Pitcher’. And tag you andthat other person . Try getting out of that one.
You can’t tell your boss you were home nursing a sick baby because a nifty little map on FB will tell the world you were doing the naughty in Nainital. And if you switch Whatsapp off or go invisible on Google, they will stalk you on Facebook. Tick one ‘Like’, just one, and wham! you will get a PM — ‘oh here you are. I’ve been trying to catch you. Shall we have coffee, play snooker, go shopping?’ Your answer is ‘no, no and no, thank you’ but now you have to say it out loud and explain why not.
You can’t even read a private message on FB and decide to reply many days later, after you have thought up some new lie, because FB will punctiliously tick the message and inform the sender that it was ‘seen’ at 9 o’clock on Tuesday morning.
Heck, you can’t even be a snobbish antisocial anymore. You write your fond 800 words on some subject and post it on Twitter or Facebook. Instantly, a comment pops up asking ‘boss firstly, y shud there b a glorification in u r article?’ Not only do you get constant company, that’s the company you get. And they comment on everything, from your politics to your cat picture. In abbvt eng tht nbdy cn rd.
And if you are reading this on Facebook or Twitter, which is where, oh sweet irony, I’ll post it, don’t call. Or text. Or Wap. I am dangerously ill. No, really, I am.
