STATUS MESSAGES AND TWEETS

Status messages and tweets have become a part of our lives. People even say that they are nothing but mere extensions of our personalities. I don’t agree with this at all. Well, neither is this completely true nor is this completely false. This is partially true.

The reason I say this is partially true is because of the simple reason that there are some people for whom status messages are actually the extension of their personalities whereas for some other people it is just a way of projecting a personality which they really don’t have. For some others, some of their status messages reflect their personalities whereas some other of their status messages do not. In fact, in today’s times when one has a different status message on Facebook and a different one on their Blackberry Messenger and a completely different one on Twitter, it is just not possible for all these statuses/tweets to reflect ones’ personality unless someone suffers from split or triple personality.

What is clear is that there is a reason or an objective behind each of these status messages or in other words the person has certain expectations when he puts some of these messages. The objective could be hiding a cryptic message in the status which only he or a select few can understand. In such cases, these messages are no less than the Da Vinci code… only people who understand would respond or comment on such a status. The other objective of a status could be simply showing one’s creativity and getting a high by noticing how many people like such a status. Sometimes people put up a status/tweet just to vent out their anger against a person, system, company, society or any other thing. Some other times the idea of putting up a message is to open up a discussion or a debate with others. Sometimes when one has been missing in action for a long time, then just to remind people that he/she exists, a status message is put up.

The reason of putting up a status or a tweet could be one or many but the truth is that each status or tweet desires a conversation as it tells the one who has put it that in this widespread social network, where there are loads of friends, followers and contacts, there are atleast a few who have read what they had to say.

I won’t be surprised if few years down the line psychologists, criminal experts and psychiatrists start analysing status messages and tweets along with the body language to figure out more about a person, but the way body language can deceive, these messages can deceive much more… so lets see!!

Contacts

Do you have contacts? Although it sounds like a very simple question, but quite often there is more to this simple question than what is seen. What one is trying to ask is that how much clout does one have. This is a question that is asked at various points of time in one’s life in India as lot of work gets done only through ‘contacts’.

But today I will not be talking about those kind of contacts. I would like to talk about the contacts that exist on our mobile phones. Each of us has a number of contacts on our mobile phones. In fact, each and every new mobile model that comes into the market promises more and more space for your contacts. From 100 to 200 to 500 and many more.

I just wonder how many of these contacts do we really contact….. and how often? In fact, the other day I was just going through my long list of contacts as I wanted to clear out some names, with whom there will be no contact or there will be no need to contact. There were some names against which I could not place any face at all nor could I recollect who or what that person had done to be a part of my contact list. Then there were some whose name was ringing a bell in the mind, but it was difficult to recollect their significance in my life. These were the easy ones to remove from the contact list as it was clear that they were not important enough to stay in my contacts list.

The difficult part came after this. As I started scrolling from one name to the other, there were faces, past memories and moments that started coming across me. Each name had a certain story and relevance in my life. Some of these names or contacts were very important in a certain phase of my life and these were the people I used to speak to very often, but as time passed by and college, cities, jobs, and relationships changed, each contact started moving up or down in one’s hierarchy of importance. Some of the regular contacts became once in a while contacts to a need based contact to a contact who just exists on my mobile phone. But these are still contacts, whose name I do not wish to delete as I feel that someday I might call them again and relive some of those old moments.

Till then Facebook will help me keep updated on a lot of them!