Viral Sickness

Today is a relatively easy day for me. I spent the morning doing some light coding work and after that drove to my meeting in Puchong at 2pm. Meeting lasted until four and then I decided to go for a haircut. A visit to the barber is something that I try to squeeze into these in-between blocks of time. Today's schedule is perfect for it.

After my quick haircut, I had a good vegetarian dinner and voila, here I am, parked at my favourite Starbucks cafe for my weekly blogging session. I have a list of topics that I want to blog on. But today I just want to do what bloggers usually do: bitch.

What's my beef? I'm just tired of petty and trivial issues that go 'viral'. I think we pay way too much attention to them. I know, strange thing for me to say for I'm dedicating an entire blog post to this topic!

I suppose it is the nature of social media, (which itself is simply a projection of our natural human need to connect with others), that contributed to the preponderance of such viral incidences. Before the advent of such technologies, rumours, scandals, gossips and issues travel by the snail-paced word-of-mouth. It is due to the amplification power of technology that the effect is magnified and making it such an annoyance.

I'm ready to accept this as a side-effect of technology. Most of the time, I ignore viral messages that keeping popping up multiple times in my WhatsApp chatgroups an Facebook timeline. I'm kind of immune to them. But what perturbs me most is when viral events become news themselves, warranting space even in dead-tree newspapers and broadcast TV. Many news programs on TV nowadays even have a dedicated segment on things that have gone viral in social media.

First of all, what even qualifies something as 'viral'? The fact that it happened to make an appearance in the editor's favourite chatgroup? A lot of the so-called viral news reported in the newspapers are not even widely known until the print media declared them as having gone 'viral'. Putting them official in newsprint immediately, without doubt, made them viral with a capital V.

News like this and this are not worth reporting. And the people online who participate in such pointless arguments online are not worth highlighting.

When people go online, they tend to become vile and vicious. Perhaps we reveal our true selves under the cloak of anonymity. Perhaps I'm doing exactly like what they are doing--venting online. so let me end this post before I start hating myself for doing it!