Why do people find Facebook compelling?
Fellow crime writer and friend AS was angry with a newspaper in a distant state capital where he is a columnist (the staff is moribund and self-important). He ranted about it on Facebook. I’m not on Facebook anymore so my wife showed me his two posts. (I de-activated my account six months ago to avoid the distraction from the book I’m currently finishing up.) I was surprised, not by his fury or by the comments section that alternated between pile-ons and Schadenfreude, but by the fact he hung his dirty laundry out in public — that too in a small town, where nobody’s a stranger. As it is, most of us avoid controversy because potential employers ask their HR departments to scroll through social media to check you out. And we avoid letting our relatives know what we’re up to.
I was wrong. At a party last weekend, a young, gungho wealth manager lectured me about the Facebook craze in small-town India. In the big cities Facebook is a way of staying connected with old friends, especially from school and college. But in small towns, it is among the most aspirational activities. Facebook is more vernacular than English in India. “300 million already,” he gasped. “Think of the monetisation possibilities.”
Indian society’s stratification is thus mirrored on social media. I fled Facebook also because I was turned off by its “friend suggestions” that showed ugly, old and stodgy journalists I wanted to avoid. Even uglier are the fake news posts that once sensible friends circulate. “It’s the new Orkut,” my wife said. “Everyone unnecessarily announces where they are going or eating,” she added, before checking her timeline for updates.
It is stunning to me that anyone still finds Facebook compelling. Confirming what the wealth manager said, I had reconnected on Facebook with friends from high school and college, without adding quality to anybody’s life. In fact, most embarrassing is when a friend from your youth does not accept your friend request (but accepts the request from a lesser friend). What happened? Do I even have time to wonder what happened?
Almost all my small-town relatives are on Facebook. My former drivers are on Facebook. A former maid is on Facebook. We saw photos of her two babies. The tailor who upholstered my sofa recently is on Facebook — my wife called him and suddenly his photo showed up in her friend suggestions. In that way, Facebook is a great democrat leveller of Indian society, and a good thing too. My mother’s cousin married his son off and posted photos on Facebook. They were poorly-lit or blurred, but they served the purpose: the cousin was proud and happy to be on Facebook.
Indeed, Facebook is for most small-town Indians less sinister than the most populous social media in the country, Aadhar (identification card). Only time will tell whether or not it is actually less sinister. What is clear is that urbane English-speakers may not engage on Facebook, but that will hardly deter its growth in India. It is not only here to stay, it makes the social media department of any political party more important that could have been conceived in the last general election in India – way back in 2014.
As for crime writer AS, his saga ended with the newspaper terminating his column because he had dragged the institution on to social media mud-slinging. This episode alone showed the power of Facebook in smalltown India.
Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist based in India
Facebook is a great democrat leveller of Indian society.