A Life for Show

My blog article last week was a pretty heavy one. I don't think I'll even want to attempt something like that this week. Let this week's topic be light and easy, simply because I have been working since 5am and am feeling quite exhausted.

So today, I'll just take my fingers for a stroll on my computer keyboard, just allowing words to pour out, no matter what the subject might be. In other words, I'll just be rambling. Since this is my blog, I can do whatever I like and I don't have a readership to please. That's the perverse pleasure and advantage of keeping a blog that no one reads.

The generation who grew up on social media today has a lot of challenges to tackle. I'm referring to the recent news of a K-Pop star who committed suicide. During my time, bullying could only happen during school-hours and your reputation is only limited to a very small world. Nowadays, cyberbullying is 24 hours and is global in scale.

When Facebook and Twitter first started, I was among the early users. It was a lot of fun in the early days. But unfortunately social media have taken over our lives. They have made everyone's life a kind of reality show. Think how strange my last statement is. Life, a reality show? Yes, we've turned our real lives into a kind of show, with a global audience in mind, until we are not able to see what is real and what is not.

Isn't it not surprising that there's such a thing called 'fake news'? Because we treat our lives as show (and shows are by definition, not real), we cannot discern what is real and unreal anymore.

I think I've mentioned elsewhere before that social media is an amplifier of human virtues and weaknesses. Like technology, it can be a force for both good and bad. Be it fame or infamy--anything can be multiplied a thousand fold in cyberspace. Issues flare up and die down in rapid cycles and we live in a incessant wave of these distractions.

It is natural for human beings to crave for attention. We want to share things with friends and with the people we care about. We used to do that when we meet face-to-face in meatspace. That is the real meaning of socializing. Nowadays, we seem to think that every brain-fart of ours is headline material. So we tweet, we upload, we post, we share with a deft swipe of the finger.

Cyberspace could be infinite. But human lifespan is finite. Is your life a 24-hour social media show where you constantly have to coax and cajole people for their attention? Maybe that's a good life. Maybe not. You decide. It's your show.