Base of the matter: Facebook

The latest name on the terror list Abu Jundal, has allegedly confessed to having nine Facebook accounts to hunt new recruits for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Jundal was one of the six handlers of the ten men who attacked Mumbai on November 26, 2008.

Facebook — the top social networking site in the online world — is the biggest cause for the increasing number of breakups in marriages, the reason for umpteen criminal deaths and the continuous cause for breakups in relationships of teenagers and adolescents. In UK, teenager Ashleigh Hall was murdered by serial rapist Peter Chapman after he groomed her on Facebook. According to Jack Doyle in the Mail Online, a crime linked to Facebook is reported to police once every 40 minutes.

A company with 901 million users, as on March 2012, is a growing hit with the youth in India too and alarmingly, like most new technology products here, being used indiscriminately. A new social phenomenon of letting the outer world know your minute-to-minute affairs of life is culling out strange patterns in the arena of mass communication. For example, college teachers are finding it easier to tune into their students who take leave on the pretext of an illness and post pictures with friends at a concert! Spouses are finding it emotionally expensive to track their mates even if they are able to do away with high charging detective agencies.

The new read-by-all-book, authored by youngster Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, had its start-up phase caught in legal tangle with him allegedly having stolen the idea from his swimmer friend during a sleepover!

Wall Street analysts could have given Facebook a lukewarm reception, weeks after the flop of this IPO and many firms could have revealed a tepid assessment of the social-network giant’s share, but the truth is bold on the wall; Facebook is changing the ethical concept of today’s generation. For youngsters who have not gradually graduated from a landline to an SMS culture, the wave of technological changes like morphed pictures on Facebook could be hard to distinguish. Many lives are being marred in the simple name of online crimes and contingencies. The police, however, are finding it easier to crack crimes, thanks to Facebook again.

Caught in the rat race of time, what we consume in bulk on the Facebook, please note is only what the writer wants to profess. Facebook falsehood, like most information on the Inter­net, could be selective, incorrect, misleading and with a purported intent of creating malice. With children less than 10 years of age, signing in as 18-year-olds, the site has now opened its flood gates to 13-year-olds too. The more friends you have on Facebook, the faster you are perceived to have arrived in life. It’s making the voyeuristic interest of humans develop much earlier as a lot of personal muck plays out on the virtual space, much like our soap operas.

According to CNet News, Facebook has let a plugin that would allow users on websites across the world to “want” specific items. Any new update in the social viral world needs to be used for the betterment of humanity. Critics will tell you that everything from advertisements to the BlackBerry has its own demerits. Like, let’s face it, indiscriminate doling out of personal information to a wide audience is neither going to help the intelligence levels of a generation with scattered interests nor focus their time on pressing issues of immediate need.

Even the cell phone is vulnerable to misuse. An SMS-oriented generation that probably knows the spelling of development only as dvpt is fighting for its rights to write answer scripts in SMS lingo. The latest defence being that even the Oxford dictionary has a new SMS counter like its just-introduced desi section.

Media observers and communication specialists in the United States predict that Facebook, though not a passing phenomenon, is definitely a wave that will ebb in the coming years. How much damage it could have printed on to its world pages alongside its popular personal communication agenda is to be seen.

The face, they say, is the index of the mind!

Tags: Abu Jundal, Facebook, featured, From the Hip, full-image, Lashkar e Taiba

Category: Opinion