BENGALURU :There’s a new app in town, friends. It’s called Clubhouse, and even though I know nothing else about the app, you can bet your vaccine on the fact that I’m going to jump on to the app. There’s something alluring about a new app that everybody’s raving about, and I can feel the FOMO rushing through my veins as I type this. One could argue that the world really does not need more social media apps. From an age when people couldn’t get in touch with each other, human beings have zoomed forward into a world where we will quickly have had enough of each other.
Look around you - do you really need another platform to stay in touch with people? There is already your email – gently nudging you that you have 5,673 unread mails waiting. You could write a touching mail to anybody you know, and yet all we use our email for is to delete ‘Happy Birthday’ messages from shopping sites. Then there is Facebook – the granddaddy of social media apps. A platform that was sold to us as the promised land – only to later descend into a manipulative platform that is listening to every single conversation, just to sell you boxer briefs with Ironman on them.
There is WhatsApp, with enough misinformation to give Richard Feynman a heart attack. What began as a platform for sharing pictures and voice notes, has descended into a flowing, molten lava of whispers, vitriol, and fake news. Recently, we have been sold the Signal app as a safer replacement for WhatsApp. Then there is Instagram - the museum of perfect lives - where Thursdays are about throwbacks and people specifically spread ‘Good vibes only’.
If you wish to communicate with the world in general, there is Twitter. A noisy space filled with trolls, memes, and people sermonising to each other on how to go about their lives. The name ‘Twitter’ might conjure up the image of cute birds chirping at each other. But in reality, ‘Dogfight’ might be a more appropriate name. If you have a job, you must be found on LinkedIn – which is basically Orkut dressed in a blazer and suit. There are of course official ‘Slacks’ and ‘Teams’ that office-going citizens have to be a part of.
Ironically, the deepest connections I’ve made with strangers online is through my blog. Even though it is more than a decade old, it allowed strangers to read my work, and their gentle nudging helped me gain confidence to become a professional writer. My readers had no idea who I was in real life, and yet we sent mails, communicated, and had discussions on numerous topics under the sun.
Which begs the question – how many apps is too many apps? Social media today is like a gigantic buffet where you HAVE to have every single dish provided. Of course, the government is busy trying to regulate the use of social media, which is another exercise in futility. There will be a mushrooming of apps in the future, as citizens move like swarms of bees from one app to the other. Nobody voted for me, but if I were in the government, I’d let the social media apps be. I’d let them go through the cycle of birth and death, and wait for the day when we go back to writing letters to each other – the true example of anti-social media!