Ketchup Friday
It's Friday, which means catch-up time with friends and family living elsewhere in the world. Our currency: photos, videos and bullet-point updates. Long gone are the days of long-ass emails (remember those?) and in its place, WhatsApp. Internet connection still sucks ass here in Jeddah, and Skype calls or Google Hangouts are more annoying than what they're worth, so I skip that. The lag makes the small talk and the "how are yous" in the beginning of the conversations even more uncomfortable.
That's weird, the fact that we still go through the how-are-yous, no matter how close we are to people. Why have we not done away with this already? Chatting and texting cancels this, thankfully, and we can just cut to the chase every time. We're constantly in communication anyway, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, through blogs, so it's really pointless to ask "how are you" anymore.
It really is no longer creepy to start conversations with "I saw your post about __" and in fact, it's become necessary to do just that, hasn't it? Isn't it a sign of quality-time-spending when you pay attention to your friends' updates online?
The way we communicate with each other has changed so much (no duh), and I've honestly gotten over the fact that people already know my updates before we even start properly catching up. It's taken me a while to be aware of the stuff that I feed to the internet, and to understand what this sharing entails, but I've made peace with it. It's like being a celebrity on a much tinier scale (minus the glamor, minus the money), isn't it?
I spent a chill afternoon yesterday with 2 of my friends, and by the time I got to the other half of my friends, they had already gotten the story of what happened just a few hours earlier. It's like we willingly Truman-show ourselves.
Does this disturb you?
That's weird, the fact that we still go through the how-are-yous, no matter how close we are to people. Why have we not done away with this already? Chatting and texting cancels this, thankfully, and we can just cut to the chase every time. We're constantly in communication anyway, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, through blogs, so it's really pointless to ask "how are you" anymore.
It really is no longer creepy to start conversations with "I saw your post about __" and in fact, it's become necessary to do just that, hasn't it? Isn't it a sign of quality-time-spending when you pay attention to your friends' updates online?
The way we communicate with each other has changed so much (no duh), and I've honestly gotten over the fact that people already know my updates before we even start properly catching up. It's taken me a while to be aware of the stuff that I feed to the internet, and to understand what this sharing entails, but I've made peace with it. It's like being a celebrity on a much tinier scale (minus the glamor, minus the money), isn't it?
I spent a chill afternoon yesterday with 2 of my friends, and by the time I got to the other half of my friends, they had already gotten the story of what happened just a few hours earlier. It's like we willingly Truman-show ourselves.
Does this disturb you?
Get out of your head. They're alive and reading and loving you. You're doing great by getting them out of their heads; by easing the burden of their disconnected exile too. <3
ReplyDelete