Being connected

You open your social network account and browse through your network’s newsfeed. You get frustrated as you scroll down and get lost in a traffic of news updates that you don’t even care about, not a single bit. You are bombarded with bits and pieces of information about your friends’ mundane living. You read why he was late for work, what new lipstick shade she bought yesterday, or what he had for lunch. If you’re lucky, there will be a photo that comes with that.

You read these stories and say, “Why do I care!?”  Your friends are putting up way too much senseless information online, and it’s torturing you.

In general, you care about what your friends have to say, and vice versa. This time, I am talking about real friends, not the ones I mentioned in the first paragraph. You look forward to hearing from them. Real friends are the ones who ask “How are you?” and “What’s up?” in the first place. Real friends are concerned. They will show genuine interest no matter how dumb your status updates may be.

Let us accept the fact that not everyone in your network is an actual friend. Even I, as I write, am guilty of thinking that. The main reason you are getting all this noise is this: Strangers and acquaintances constitute a large part of your network.  You have nobody else to blame for your dire situation but yourself. You have let all these people in. With every “friend” request that you accept, you risk making your online community even more cluttered.

As long as we maintain all these friends in our network, we will be barraged with unwanted information. Let’s accept that fact and be patient… It’s the price of being connected.

Marnelli R. Bangloy, 23, is a multimedia studies graduate of the University of the Philippines Open University.