The Facebook Status Update Syndrome

Facebook status update syndrome is a disease that has affected and is currently affecting a lot of people. Being a Business Management graduate I am aware of the fact that the phrase - 'a lot' means nothing. Do I mean 70% of Facebook users or one in every five users? I’ve not taken a survey or done too much market research to prove the point either. I'm sorry I don't have any stats so let me just say 'a lot'.  If you think differently please feel free to do so (although I think that might be  a sign that you’re one of the ‘diseased’!! Ha Ha Ha!!!)

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I was actually writing a post on Facebook users in a broader context but then I thought I feel more passionately (in the negative sense of course) about these mundane status updates which some people tend to post, that no one (or very few) in the world is interested in. It’s become such a mess and the people who I refer to sometimes seem to have completely lost the plot.  

The people who dump all their dirty laundry on the status update box are the ones I see a lot. Drama Queens (DQ) is the word that describes them (I copied it from another blog due to a temporary lack of imagination). Examples of DQ posts are “I’ve just been dumped”, “I just found out that I’m terrible at my job” and worse ones that I’d rather not mention here. The hilarious part is there will be people to ‘Like’ these posts and then pose the million dollar question “Oh how sad! What happened?” to which sometimes you can expect a reply like, “Will tell you when we meet in person” from DQ. Why put up something that you actually don’t want to share the details of with the whole world on your online status?

Next we have Devdas alias Servant of God (SoG). The updates you will see on Devdas’ profile are nothing short of philosophic jargon. Most of these are of course copied. I have yet to see an original Devdas on Facebook (one who can write his own crap).  Of course this is just another attempt to garner some attention as SoG knows no better or constructive way of doing that. It's okay to have favorite quotations and to post something that's interesting but at least give the audience some breathing space and give a little credit to the guy who actually said it. 

The Son of a Gun (SoG2) is the third and final category. SoG2 is a perfect fit for the famous quote, "Where ignorance predominates, vulgarity invariably asserts itself", by I-don't-know-who-said-it (hmmm... example of ignorance!). SoG2 is without doubt the king of status updates. Just as the above cases, posts are very rarely  meaningful and therefore mostly useless and then their winning (or losing) formula is the addition of a more than generous dose of expletives. A post for SoG2  without the vulgar stuff is like an Indian curry without the garnishing. The curry(post) seems wonderful(terrible), but without the garnishing(expletives) you feel its good and not excellent(bad and not outrageous). Either these people are inebriated when they post or just plain stupid.

I wonder what prompts people to share such updates - insecurity, just a desperate need for attention, or what exactly? Now you might wonder, so what? Well, a professor of mine at university said once in a class that what we post online nowadays on social websites is a "digital footprint" that is tough if not impossible to erase. I totally agree with that point as more and more companies look at prospective employees' social media pages before hiring them. So even if you are not 'diseased', there sure is a need to clean up your act, if you've been putting things that do not present a pretty picture, at least for your sake.