Remember the time when Facebook was all about posting these witty one-liner ‘status updates’? You just had to fill in the blank: Malini is … something. And, of course, I would try and think of the cleverest thing (or so I thought at the time). Here are a few of my classics:
*The last was one of my favourites and Timehop tells me that was fifteen years ago. Back then, I felt this weird excitement that all my friends, and some random acquaintances, would read these and think I’m so clever, so cool. Virtual life was fun. I could send my friends virtual gifts, find old boyfriends just to see how awful they looked after a few years (you’ve done it too, admit it #stalkedanexonfacebook) and share my fabulous life (or at least just the parts that looked fabulous) with the entire world—in an instant. So yeah, I drank the Kool-Aid. I was obsessed. I’d post pictures of everything I did, in real time. And suddenly my world was populated with everyone whose names or faces I could remember. Amazing, right?
And then came Stage 2: Twitter … (aka the artist formerly known as Twitter, now just an ominous X thanks to Elon Musk) I remember I was at a bar in Mumbai called Ghetto, and Rohit Gupta, a friend I used to play pool with, came up to me and casually said, ‘Hey, Malini, have you heard of Twitter? I think you will like it …’ I went home, made my Twitter account and posted asking people to follow my blog …
And BOOM! I had started a real-time dialogue with the entire world in twenty seconds. This was not just a one-way conversation. It was an actual dialogue. Have you ever thought about how people communicated in the past? Without phones or fax machines or email? The ancient Greek messenger Philippides (530–490 bc) ran a distance of about 250–300 kms in two–three days and then ran back.
He ran from Athens to Sparta and then to Marathon and finally back to Athens to announce the victory of the Greeks over the Persians.
That’s intense. In fact, just about twenty years ago, you had to wait three weeks for a reply to your painstakingly written snail mail (if you were Salman Khan, you had to train his kabutar to ‘Jaa jaa jaa’ and deliver his ‘pehli pyaar ki pehli chitthi’). But now I had this amazing superpower to communicate instantly with anyone … even though I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do with it. It felt like being in a virtual living room, like walking around having various, simultaneous conversations with people I’d never met, but without that awkward introduction of ‘Who are you? What do you do? What are you doing here? Who invited you?’. I could dive right in. No security check and no invitation required.
This magical ability of communicating with more people than otherwise humanly possible, by typing 140 characters and hitting send, blew my mind. And then came Instagram. To which I was late by a whole year! If you remember, the first time Instagram launched it was only available on iOS, for iPhone users. I couldn’t get Instagram because I didn’t have an iPhone and I even started a ‘Malini needs an iPhone’ campaign with little success. Eventually, of course, Instagram went Android and my Insta-FoMO was alleviated.
But why do I love social media so much? This tool could amplify your ability to connect with people on a scale that is not otherwise humanly possible. I can have 5,000 friends on Facebook (odd cut-off point, btw) and connect with them at different times about different things but I can never keep up that number of relationships in real life. The fact is, there are proper scientific reasons as to why we’re so hooked to social media.
This excerpt from Malini Agarwal’s ‘Under the Influence’ has been taken with permission from HarperCollins.