In this age of social media, we share our thoughts, joys and disappointments with an army of strangers who are often ‘friends' in the virtual world. INNLIVE tells us how the concept of love has changed with the advent of the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
For better or for worse, we live in an age of social media. Thanks to networks like Twitter and Facebook, we can share our thoughts, our joys and our disappointments with the world at large, sharing our innermost thoughts with an army of strangers who are often ‘friends’ in the virtual world.
The recent death of Sunanda Pushkar put the focus on this fact. Some hyperactive television anchors were quick to blame social networks. But despite this ill-will, the fact remains that Indians have taken to social media like a fish to water. Facebook is close to crossing 100 million users in India, if it has not done so already. India is among the top five countries with Twitter accounts. The past two years have seen tens of millions of Indians sign up for high-speed mobile data.
And a direct by-product of all this has been the way we interact with those we love. Relationships are not private anymore, they have become increasingly public. It is not as if people did not have one-night stands and extramarital affairs before the prominence of social media; but in today’s world an aggrieved party can write a post and it could potentially go viral on Twitter, or all of your friends and family can read the status on Facebook. The potential is there for not just high levels of embarrassment but also to damage one’s professional and personal equations.
But, as Narendra Nag, vice-president Asia-Pacific, Social Media Hive of French media firm MSL, points out, in today’s times the very ‘concept of love’ has changed. “We use that word far more liberally nowadays, and the love that some people show towards inanimate objects through social media sites is genuinely surprising.”
Facebook has irrevocably changed the way we look at relationships. A Facebook spokesperson highlighted the fact that the site makes no claims towards responsibility to what people post on the site and that users need to understand what they are exactly sharing on the site. There is a complex web of privacy settings that can help users of Facebook hide information from the wider world while still continuing to use the site, but most users are unaware of this.
Angad Chowdhry, managing partner, Sphinx, a self-described digital ethnographic consultancy, has studied reams of data about ‘modern’ relationships from Facebook. He finds Facebook’s concept of the ‘It’s Complicated’ relationship status very interesting. “Looking at photographs of younger people in India who have tagged themselves as “in a relationship” as well as “it’s complicated” throws up some startling facts about romance in the age of social media. For people who are “in a relationship”, there is an interesting arc. Before the relationship begins, the female friend of the girl is always in the photograph, suggesting that she has been brought for a date for proprietary reasons. After the relationship has commenced, we notice that this friend is no longer present in date photographs. Instead, the male friend of the guy in the relationship dominates.”
Chowdhry goes on to add, “In contrast to this, for people whose relationship status is tagged ‘it’s complicated’, the photographs are totally different. Going on dates, there is always a third person present (the person who takes the photograph), but this person never puts themselves in the picture. They try to ‘vanish’ from the public record. This suggests that younger people are extremely savvy about their lives being archived online and, more significantly, whether we see them or not, there is always a third person witnessing the romance. You can, of course, push this claim further and suggest that this third person — real or imagined — is the true audience for the romance unfolding on the Internet.”
So is Chowdhry right? Is the wider world, which takes the place of the so-called third person, the real reason for several modern relationships? Are we advertising the fact that we are with someone we apparently love to show something to the world. Not everybody is convinced. Deepti (name changed), a ‘committed’ girl in her late 20s, argues that she puts her relationship status on Facebook because she genuinely loves her partner and sees no reason to hide it. Yet, in saying this she confirms Chowdhry’s point of the ‘third person’ which could be the world at large being the true audience for these status updates.
But what when one partner is obviously angry with the other and starts posting updates that could potentially upset the other. “Infidelity is not new in human society, it happened before Facebook. But, yes there is possibly a whole new paradigm to being exposed now,” says Nag. This is possibly what happened with a well-known couple in Delhi recently, while there was no proof of infidelity, the very fact that social media became a tool to ‘expose’ people, particularly those followed by millions on social media was unprecedented.
“We live in an interesting time where relationships are built and broken on social networks,” Nag says. However, he does add that this shift challenges older people more than the younger lot. “Younger people who have grown up with the Internet and compulsive sharing will adapt to these changes far better than those in their mid-30s and older, that is a fact of life.”
So complain as one might about social media, the fact remains that relationships being advertised on social media are a fact of life in today’s day and age. Whether Facebook or Twitter survive into the next decade are moot points, the Internet is here to stay as are relationships on the Web. Relationship counsellors and psychiatrists are to get used to this new reality.
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