Being Social

Year 2004
I got back home from college and ran straight to my desktop PC. I first switched on my CPU and then the monitor and logged in to my Orkut account via Internet Explorer. There was a new testimonial waiting for me there written by my friend Prashanth and I was excited to read it though I had been bugging him to write one for me since weeks! It would show on my Orkut profile page and everyone would view it. Satisfied with what he had to say about me I then went onto check if I had any scraps waiting for me. There were a few and I replied to them, making sure not to share anything personal since everyone could read them.

The next hour or so went by in going through profiles of my friends and also reading their scraps on others walls. Just then my Nokia 3310 phone rang to its classic tune. I saw that it was my friend Avakash. I didn’t pick the call. I gave it 10 seconds or so and it stopped. I called him back and again gave him a quarter of a ring. Just missed calls because talking on a mobile phone was pretty expensive. I had an SMS plan of 100 messages free per day and I had exhausted my quota by forwarding some messages that I had received that day to many of my contacts. I played the snake game on my phone for a while got bored and got back to my desktop.

Besides Orkut, I had an account on Hi5 too, the other social networking site. Not many people were on it so I just logged in and logged out. I then watched a video of the song THE REASON by Hoobastank on You Tube which was one of my all time favourite videos and one of the Top 10 videos at the time.  I then logged back in to orkut to check if the girl I had seen in dance class had accepted by friends request or not. She hadn’t. I went back downstairs and watched tv for an half an hour. But got back to my desktop again, restarted it and repeated the entire process again!

Year 2015
I wake up at 6 in the morning to check my Nexus 5 phone. It has 60 notifications on Whatsapp. Most of them are group messages. On my school group they are discussing about our school days and I contribute a few of my memories to the conversations . I don’t even know where the SMS app on my phone is anymore.

Its my free day from the hospital so I head out to the bank to open an account. I take my token which shows Number 23. So I sit in the corner and wait for my turn. As I have nothing else to do, I grab my phone and open the Facebook app. I check my notifications which show that I have quite a few likes for my profile picture. I then scroll down like photos of various friends of mine.

As I go through my news feed, I see a friend of mine has posted something about AIB knockout on his wall with a Youtube link. Eager to check it out and careful enough not disturb others around me, I fish for my earphones in my bag and plug them into my phone. I then watch the AIB knockout video on Youtube. It was pretty hilarious in parts but crass for the most of it. For most part it was just Karan Johar making a fool of himself. Just as I was halfway through the 2nd part of the video, I heard my number being called and I logged out and proceeded to the counter.

As I was finishing my account work, the clerk at the bank told me that for a change the Indian bowling was doing well. That’s when I realized that I had completely forgotten about India’s match against Australia. I quickly opened the Cricinfo app on my phone and started following ball by ball details of the match. But what fun is cricket these days if you don’t follow all the hilarious tweets about the match on Twitter. So I got onto the Twitter app on my phone simultaneously and checked my Twitter Line. It was buzzing with Match related tweets. The 3 favorite Twitter celebs of mine @Trendulkar, @RameshSrivats & @Coolfunnytshirt were on a roll posting one witty tweet after the other!

I reached home and my phone beeps. I check it and see that my professor has endorsed me on LinkdIn. I am delighted! I decide to blog about the day on my site www.ryanfernandes.in  I remember how I had to sit on the desktop just to post a blog on my site www.makingmemories.multiply.com just a few years ago. But now everything was right in the palm of my hands. Throughout the day I had clicked a series of pictures and I posted them all through my phone to my blog with the name “Diversity”. My photoblog for the day was done! As simple as that.

My wife saw my post and told me that I had done a great job with it. She then took out her own phone and opened her Instagram app and showed me that our family picture had received over 100 hearts! I asked her to send me the same picture through Whatsapp and I posted it on my Instagram profile too. And then I waited for the likes…….. Unlike 10 years back I didn’t have to keep switching on my  computer to keep a track of the hearts. I look at my desktop still in the same place as 2004. It still worked, though I hardly used it anymore. Times have surely changed!

AUTHORS NOTE: I am participating in the #SMWBangalore activity at BlogAdda in association with Social Media Week Bangalore“