“Your engineering experience looks great. But your social media score is zero,” says the pointy-haired manager in Dilbert, the satirical office-humour cartoon strip.
“You have no friends, no followers and no social influence whatsoever,” he tells the hapless jobseeker.
The engineer tries to tell him that it is maybe because he focuses on his work. But the manager says: “No. I am pretty sure you are dead.”
So just to make sure that I am not dead, I have got on to various social media platforms. My latest foray into this new online world is now on Instagram — thanks to my niece in New York who introduced me to it. She loves to take street shots in her vibrant city and interesting cloud formations and uploads it here.
Instagram as you know is an online mobile photo and video sharing freeware founded by two geeks from San Francisco and it became so immensely popular that Facebook bought it off them for $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion). Incidentally, it comes from the joining of two words, Instant Camera and Telegram.
I uploaded pictures I had taken of the street in front of the doctor’s office one evening and immediately received three hearts from women in the US who said they liked it. A ‘heart’ is similar to a ‘Like’ in Facebook. “Wow, I am famous. I must be good,” I told myself and that put pressure on me to shoot some real breath-taking pictures. But I realised that it takes a lot of hard work and a keen eye for detail. My friend in India then asked me to share pictures with him on Picasa.
A relative in Oman later asked me to download Dropbox so that we could share documents such as press cuttings or scanned passages from books and pictures. I had to call my sons for help.
“You don’t know what Pinterest is?” screeched my ex-colleague in surprise suddenly as we were discussing social media. “Excuse me!” I said. “You don’t have to make me out as if I was someone from 1999,” I said.
She explained it was like an online board where you can pin the things that interest you, for reading later. “Sounds like my crazy uncle who used to collect back copies of Reader’s Digest to read later,’ I said.
He never could read the huge stack of magazines and had to sell them by weight to the “raddiwalah” (scarp buyer) who came on a bicycle with dodgy weights and a wonky scale and who bargained hard because the magazines had silverfish that were eating all the pages.
I had resisted getting on to Facebook for a long time and now I am on it most of the day, checking on my Smartphone now and then whether anyone ‘liked’ what I had uploaded. It is addictive and if I find that no one likes what I posted, I go into throes of insecurity. Not willing to open up to online friends that much, I first became what is termed as the “lurker” or the “stalker”. I would trawl through their accounts, check what everyone had uploaded, what they had for lunch and flipped through their pictures. Then I started pressing the ‘like’ tab for everyone’s posts without saying a thing or commenting about it. It was like being a higher being that was passing judgement.
Since I did not have a whole lot of friends, I asked total strangers to be my friend, something that I thought I would never do — be so needy and beg people for their online company. I can imagine the conversation: “Sandra, this weirdo wants me to connect. Should I like totally block him?”
All this socialising on social media has tired me out and I think I may have to get back to my books.
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai.
