Life on the internet
I was among the many millions who sparked rage when applications from Meta incurred an error. As a person whose life depends highly on social media, I was panicking when I could not log in to my account. What made me worry was the possibility of hackers taking over my account. They might be posting lewd content on my page or extorting my friends for money. I just could not let that happen. One's instinct is to instantly move to another platform for confirmation on the incident. It was then I knew that Meta was having an outage.
It was unclear what caused it but its top officials assured its users that they were immediately working on it. They also did not say how long it would take them to finish fixing the problem. Instead of sleeping in early, I was up all night waiting for things to normalize. The incident was a nightmare to all social media managers. It was only then I realized that we have become so dependent on social media.
Take for instance our mode of communication. We seldom text or call using our SIM cards these days. I would prefer being sent a message on Messenger because the notifications would not be removed unless I open it. There is also more liberty on Meta applications such as choosing to mute a conversation or block one person. It is simply convenient. Most of my work-related group chats are also on Messenger.
There was the presence of anxiety that made me feel out of place and detached from the world. In fact, my friends and I had to "evacuate" to another messaging platform to recover from the trauma the incident gave. We had to make sure we were okay and that we would wait together until it was working as it should. When it came back, we doubled the effort to check if everything was in order.
We have become so independent with placing our lives on the internet that we are losing touch with reality. On family lunches and dinners, we are burying our faces on the screens instead of talking to each other. Our updates and silly antics are more felt with emojis and GIF’s, forgetting the real human connection when with one another. A fraction of our life is for public consumption.
We can never escape technology in the days ahead. We should also not forget the true essence of living. It is in human connection that we thrive more. This includes the physical talking, laughing, and all other actions done with time spent. The screen cannot replace any role such as being a babysitter, a teacher and whatnot. We will need to work on building more connections online than offline. I would tell myself to stop panicking if the outage would happen again. I would instead put the phone down and look for other things to do such as activities that existed before the computer did.