I DON'T KNOW WHERE SOCIAL MEDIA ARE TAKING US TO.

We are living in the digital age, the age in which we think we are connected because distance is no longer a barrier to communication. It is a great  privilege to live in this generation where we can chat with people across the continents, is it not? But, according to the laws of nature, there is no single thing which is lacking side effects. That means even this advancement in technology has a lot of negative impacts. Perhaps you have never thought of this, but that does not negate the fact that the negative impacts of advancement in technology are huge and maybe they are outweighing the positive results.

I will only discuss the social networks. Today we have unnumbered social platforms where people air out their views; Facebook, Instagram, twitter, WhatsApp etc. We are spending a lot of money to buy data, why? In order to stay connected. If you stay offline for a certain while you feel like your ear is tingling, you feel like you are missing something very important and immediately you go online only to see a new photo posted by your friend! We call this fear of missing out, it is a disease!

One problem with social networks is that people assume insanity in most of their dealings. Some are using fake identification, why use a fake ID if you are serious? Let me write about WhatsApp; the fastest growing messaging app in the third world countries. There are groups where people can share their views about the given topic. It has been a very helpful feature, no body can say against it. But again nature says; the degree of entropy increases with time. The more time goes the more things become disorganized. Some people are members of 50 groups! Sometimes they don't open the messages for one month or when they open they can't manage to read them, what they do is just scrolling down to the last message. I always ask these people why stay in a group where you don't read the messages thereof? Why not leave?
It may seem a little issue but it has proved an obstacle to many important issues. It is difficult for people to meet frequently for discussing issues pertaining to their organization and therefore they resort to WhatsApp groups for conducting meetings and discussing other issues. Now think of this member who doesn't open the group to see what is being discussed, you think this person is of any benefit in this meeting?

We have organizations such as TUCASA where leaders send announcements in their groups hoping that every member will be informed because he/she is in the group. But the irony is that right after the leader has sent the announcement in the group or perhaps he has been posting the same announcement for about a week, another man comes and asks the same thing which has been described in the announcements! It needs forbearance to handle this.

I remember ten years ago when we were chatting through text messages. You would be staring at your phone screen waiting for your friend to respond to your text. You had no guts of not replying a single text message, but what about today? People are not replying text messages especially on WhatsApp, or if they reply it is very late. Some say that they are busy, but I don't believe in business, it is the matter of priority! People don't just communicate, they weigh you on the balances, if you are fitting then your message will be replied but if you are found wanting you will end up seeing blue ticks. This is equal to not responding to a salutation when you meet physically. Where is that brotherly love?

The status updates is another calamity which I have observed on WhatsApp. Most of the people are posting nonsense. They have no important message to deliver but only to make you laugh. They act as if we were born to laugh. Some are quarreling with their boyfriends, instead of solving them privately, they rush into posting on status updates, who told them that we need to know that you have  problems against your man?  I am trying to see if it is really important to use WhatsApp.

Benjamin Juma
nyamseri@dr.com