Sojourning from social media to the real world
When she deactivated her social media accounts the other day, there was speculation among gossipmongers on what could have prompted her to take the drastic decision. The self-appointed jury of gossipmongers promptly sat on judgment and pronounced her “depressed”.
Looking at the conclusion they reached, what’s most demeaning is the insensitive choice of words used to describe her potential mental state. The word depressed was being casually thrown around in general conversation as if it did not have a deeper, more significant connotation. Rather than using the layman’s term of being sad, they labelled her depressed, which in fact is a clinical condition.
Even if, by chance their prognosis aligns with the actual reason of her leave of absence, would they do anything to help her out? The rumour mill is like today’s media that simply broadcasts the happenings and does not get to the root of the problem or look for solutions.
According to an interesting psychological theory called fundamental attribution error, we humans are conditioned to arbitrary guesswork and jump to our limited pool of knowledge to assign causes to any so-called discrepancies in behaviour. We gener
THE RUMOUR MILL IS LIKE TODAY’S MEDIA THAT SIMPLY BROADCASTS THE HAPPENINGS AND DOES NOT GET TO THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM OR LOOK FOR SOLUTIONS.
ally assign an internal cause for unsocial behaviour of others, but when it comes to ourselves in the same position, we prefer giving the effect an external cause.
Like in this case when X goes off social media for whatever reason, people are quick to attribute this effect to the cause that X is depressed or asocial, but when these attributers quit for whatever reason, they like to shrug it off with an external undertone such as, “I’m just taking a break.” Or, “I’m simply detoxifying and removing distractions.”
The reason for her sabbatical may have been something as trivial as removing apps that take up too much space on her phone but that’s after she made a constant effort to prolong her stay on social media platforms so that she’s not called names behind her back.
It’s true for a lot of us who join and sustain ourselves on social media just to be marked present; so that the known and unknown do not conjecture causes for our non-presence, because anyone who is absent is considered a ‘dinosaur’ or ‘living under a rock’.
So why is it such a big deal to others when we cease operations of our alternate superfluous identities, but are very much physically present in the real world? It seems the hollow social persona has overshadowed the real living and feeling person.
We need to normalise this brave act of absenteeism from social media because we need to be authentic, real people than put on exaggerated acts of camaraderie and jubilation on the digital front.