So, recently (more like yesterday), I was chatting with a person who I don’t really know. So without thinking a lot about it, I said hi. Now, I am not a very verbose person and my abilities of actually catching social queues is, well, let’s just say are not very polished. In any case, this person went on to point out how I have been quite inconsistent with my blog and haven’t posted anything in quite some time. This got me thinking and as this person is into the marketing side of things, so they do possibly have a different outlook on things and it might be very interesting to talk to them on the same topics I think about, I asked about their blog and something that they have written.

Now, Back to the original topic. I assume, at this point, that I need to be a little more regular. So, I asked what archie’s blog looks like and the thing to which I got pointed to (and I will refrain from putting a link here!) is well, let’s just say, is nothing but a brain fart/vomit.

The blog was just a continuous stream of cat pictures and spotify music posts. Now, I might not be a big editor or some scholar in creative writing, but even I can tell that this blog is of no consequence to anyone/anything.

This brought me to a very important observation about our generation’s obsession with divulging every single detail of our lives. Most of the things that we do are NOT gems of our civilization and quite frankly is not something that you or for that matter anyone needs to share/know about. No one, I think, is bothered with how you got yourself out of the bed in the morning or how bad your nail painting abilities are or how cute your cat looks sleeping for the 500th time.

Sharing is one thing that we have somehow compeletely got out of whack. The idea behind this might be pretty simple, so, for a minute, rewind back to the stone age where the caveman lived pretty much exposed and survived primarily because the herd stuck together.

As a caveman, I shared my bison meat with others and others shared the fruits they forraged with me. In a similar way, the cavemen shared their knowledge, where to hunt, where to get food, places to stay away from and predators. Now, if I was to waste everyone’s time with grunts about how I threw a stone on a duck and an egg came out, it might be funny at first and maybe even a good pick-up grunt at a cave-party (yea! I said it!). But sooner or later, someone will club me in the face.

Now, let me be clear, by no means, I am a hermit. I just think that there needs to be some form of personal accountability about what we share. Social media has made the world a closely knit and smaller place. People living across the street are almost the same as the ones living half way across the globe. This would be unthinkable even 10 years ago. The world economies have evolved around this concept and continues to do so. Newer areas of research have emerged, this has allowed us to tap into newer avenues of collaboration. We have seen revolutions being reported, a new era of journalism rise to power and more accountability arise from this. Heck, I myself owe my bread and butter to this very concept.

But it makes me sad, yes actually sad, when I hear that people are now wasting (yes I do mean waste in the cores sense of the word) their time in front of a screen, oogling at senseless posts on facebook and twitter about how much one of your acquaintances just loves hershey’s kisses. A relief, once in a while, is fine. It lets us connect with other people on a personal level (which, is just foo-bar to my brain). It informs us and connects us to the human race. But, that’s where we get carried away.

People overshare and then regret it. We hear about cyber stalkers or companies who find out the stupid things that people shared on their public facebook pages without thinking. Followed by people getting mad at service providers for sharing information, to actually do their job (and dare I point out, you agreed to the T&C). It just makes my jaw drop at the stupidity of people.

How dumb do you need to be? If you don’t want something online, don’t put it there! period. It’s as simple as that. I have learnt this simple fact over the last two and a half decades of my existance. The human brian is a really good optimization engine. You give it any scenario, it will work it out and share and collaborate with others and process information to give you the best possible way of doing the task. Failing to do something is just it’s way of working out the problem.

If you apply this same strategy to stalkers and employers they are just optimizing, in a way, to know their target (obsessively) or reducing risk of the new employee being a business risk.

To end this, rather poorly structured post, I would just like to say that I don’t intend to come off as a person who is overly paranoid. But we live in a time where everything has more impact than you thought. Technologies are advancing much faster than we can take stock of. It is very possible to cross reference anything with anything else if one has the time and patience. One migth be bold enough to propose that the surgeon general may mandate a warning to sent with every new internet bill saying “Sharing and surfing on the internet may pose a serious health risk.” Though that might be a little over the top ;)

PS: Archie* here you go! I updated my blog and now you have a piece of my mind on something for you to ruminate upon.