Why no selfies for me

'One word is too often profaned' and it is untaming, obsessive and addictive. It is the inane act of taking 'selfie'. Selfie is the buzz word that has taken over all other internet jargon in no time making it the most used and the most abused smartphone app.

I find this selfie thing very annoying. I hate people taking selfies all over the places, whenever, wherever and out of no where. They don't stop at it and go on to post it in social media for reasons best known to them. The falsehood that envelops the 'likes' from ghost friends in social media is something that gives us virtual pleasure. We are mystified by the unknownness of the internet little realizing that we are drifted far from what is real, what is beautiful and what is ours. I hate it when five to six and more people take a groupie ( a group selfie) when they can conveniently have a nice photograph done without much ado and very neatly too. People are so much obsessed with themselves being appreciated. (So what it is from some virtual user names - some even with funny alpha numeric prototypes). Every second the internet is congested with few thousands of selfies making it viral with unwanted fragmented data. It scares me to think about it all. Once we post a photo we just have had it! No way we can undo its footprints from the face of internet. As a result, ten years hence we just might have to bite our tongue for some duck face act years back. Who knows we may have to struggle to get weird excuses to convince our kids!

Having said that the usefulness of the art of selfie taking cannot and should not be ignored. Selfies are saviors in times of need. It can reach you to someone you badly need to instantly. Like to your doctor who just wants to see your not so nice face spots or your friend hair stylist who may come up with a brilliant suggestion on a bad hair day or your family geographically far apart. To add to it if you can master the art of taking selfies you can really have some confident photos to archive.

Selfies with celebrities have replaced the good ol' time sake's autographs. I wonder, how do the celebrities go through the ordeal of posing with the fans upclose and personal. I find this bizarre. Selfies, today, are all over the places and people post too many of them too often. Also, the celebrity selfies in the endeavour to reach out to the people are all over the social media making the art very shallow and abysmally misused.

Personally, I do take selfies at times when there is no one to take mine and when I may just need to send one to my family abroad. I think that makes sense since I am not posting them on social media just for the sake of it and waiting every moment to check the number of likes that I derive from it. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook are three top 'most selfie abused' places in the world wide web. The downside of this? Something that we are going to pay the penalty for in near future. The penalty for misusing the most beautiful and useful invention of the century - the internet. And the legacy that we are going to leave for our children would certainly not be a pleasant one. Something to ponder upon.

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3 negative experiences on Facebook and the effects

More and more kids and teens are spending time on social networking sites. Facebook is no.1 on the list of priority. Facebook and other social networking sites are great to revive, maintain and extend relationships. It just takes clicks to connect to your childhood friends or tether to new found friends. As much as Facebook is known to renew relationship its also a major tool in shattering relationship. A research shows that the more time kids and teens spent on Facebook, the more likely they were to suffer from ailments like personality disorder, paranoia, anxiety and alcohol use.

According to a new study, the three most-common negative experiences are:

Ignoring or denying "friend" requests
Deleting public messages
Seeing a 'Top Friends list' on which one doesn't appear or is ranked lower than expected


All three of the major negative experiences are ones that can be found only in the world of social networking. In real life, one does not walk up to another person and ask to "friend" him or her. Experience in social interactions in the real world often doesn't translate to the virtual world. Even the word "friend" means vastly different things to different people in the social networking world.

In such scenario, ending up having a shattered relationships have far fetched implications. Children, teens and even grownups get so involved that they do not know where to draw the line. Virtual friendship is healthy as long as you know the limitations of it. Many use social networking sites as important business tool marketing their products. it's but obvious that those people befriend with a purpose on mind. Without being judgmental, we should be mature enough to understand the limitations of the social networking sites. Ending up with broken hearts is the last thing we would want, both online or offline.