Sunday, February 19, 2012

Social Notworking and the Tragedy of Trivia

Q. What starts with FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and very quickly degenerates into TOI, BollywoodHungama and Rediff.com/Movies?
A. My eclectic selection of webpages which perform a yeoman service of wasting my time ... a resource which seems to be getting annoyingly sparse nowadays ...

Social Notworking

What started as a desperate need to provide some distraction from work pressure, has become a Frankenstein in its own right. I barely know 10% of all my "friends" and I am sure there will be a smaller number accounting for those who know me well enough.

What was technically meant to be a tool to improve social relations has made me even more impersonal. A couple of years back I managed to call all my "friends" at least a couple of times a year. Now I talk to a virtual wall.

Tragedy of Trivia

There were times when I prided myself for the fact that I could wedge arcane sands of trivia in all available places in my brain. It helped me during quiz competitions and other college festival events. I used to absorb any magazine that I found lying around. Exposure to the world wide web made this easier. Cut to the present day though ... the trivia is beginning to push out the good stuff from the brain.

The fact that I'm not alone isn't very comforting. I've decided to make a conscious effort to cut down on this vice. Whenever I find myself drifting along the meandering waters of junk, I'm going to try and jolt myself out of it and try to do something useful. Solve puzzles if nothing else.

The little grey cells need a jump start ...