Social media has evolved so much in recent days and has an unbelievable impact on all of us. Everything appears to be driven by social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp. These applications are playing major roles and consuming much of our precious time. In many ways, advancement of social media is an advantage and being the great admirer of this technological trend, I have some reservations about the way we use these social media applications. Few of the recent encounters and arguments with my friends are really causing little worries to me.
After few days , I started noticing that our discussion about politics and religion arose to the extent where we used to take the positions on issues, started criticising each other views. These discussions turned into wild debates also. It is absolutely fine that social media gives us the good platform to discuss all these sensitive issues. But personally speaking that group was not originally started for this. It was meant for friendly discussions, it was a group of friends who had come from different religion, different backgrounds and with different political inclinations. Obviously, many of our debates were not suitable for the whole group. Some of our comments and messages in some debates might hurt others sentiments and their views. That was really great cause for concern at that time. Even though other group members were not interested in these discussions , we would broadcast our comments to them.
When understood this, I raised this issue with our group debaters, interestingly they were not ready to agree on this my point and labelled me as intolerant. I was intolerant according to them because I tried to caution them to not to discuss some of the religious and politically sensitive issues on WhatsApp group. Instead, i suggested them to discuss and raise these issues in the platforms where these supposed to be discussed and debated.We have many such intellectual and credible platforms for these issues.
Of course, I understand, it is their wish to discuss what they want and It is totally up to me to decide what discussions I should take part in and how to react. But as a responsible group member, I should also have the responsibility to caution them about such sensitive issues which would hurt the people around us even they are are not interested in. But some of my group members were so adamant that they were not ready to accept this basic common sense of sensitivity and continued to debate such issues in an aggressive way and I gracefully exited from those groups.
In my personal view, Social media is the great way to get connected to the world. We need to use them sensibly to enjoy the essence of this technology. But in wrong platforms with wrong people by wrong interpretations sending a wrong message to whole groups might affect the harmony among friends groups.
Regards
Niranjan
