Are we obsessed with social media or obsessed with us?

Social media is an addiction. But a question remains are we obsessed with social media or with ourselves? This thought comes when the earnest desire to get popular on social media prevails. And this desire knows no bound. It can trespass the limits of what should be done or should not be done. So we find people stealing other’s updates and posting it as their own without giving any due credit to the person who actually posted it. Result is there are accolades and appreciation. Then starts the phase of winning appreciation. This is a dangerous phase indeed where people can go to any limit to get the buzz (or popularity as it is known on social media). 

What is more distressing is the fact that people don’t realize they are doing anything wrong. Plagiarism happens even from external sources and not only from the network within. There are more instances where people have given false identities and created an online  reputation of themselves. Stories are spun and instances mentioned to validate the false identity and the saga continues. Another thing which is noticed is when these fake identities are revealed and people get to know of the real story, the actual buzz starts and turns viral. The popularity does come for the person with the fake identity, doesn’t  matter if it is a negative one. I have come to know of one instance where a person impersonated a RAW agent and when the fact got evident on Twitter where this person had acquired some sort of popularity, his name trended among the topics of the day. He got popularity but how? 

What is interesting is that neither the fake popularity nor the disclosure is permanent and ultimately everything fades away. People are so busy in new things which are happening every day or engaged in what happens around their space that they don’t care much for who did what. Can we conclude here that social media is gradually made into more of a virtual world with less substance? What happened to the terminology then that it was an amalgam of real and virtual. There was a definite connect too with the real world, isn’t it? 

I would say all is still not lost. And we can change the obsession if we want to. We should stop putting people on  a pedestal and interact with them as we would in real lives. We need to do away with the concept of celebrity. What do you mean by Facebook and Twitter celebrity? Social media is supposed to have a human element and how would we achieve that? By attaining a celeb status, never? If that would have been the case then the real life celebrities would have been all popular and when I say popular it mean they would have been able to initiate social media revolutions always. Does that happen? Social media is a great leveller and if it can bring real life celebrities to the ground level then it can also create celebrities from the common people but most importantly we all are here to connect and share and not to create a fake aura around us.