FACEBOOK: THE NEW BRAGVILLE?

My egg headed Sociology professor, relying on his dog eared notes which he took back in the day at Stanford University told us there were two types of statuses-achieved or ascribed. Achieved status is the one gets through toil and sweat. Ascribed is the status that you get from your parents. Some will call it pedigree. It‘s coded in your parents social DNA which passes to you ultimately.

However, in the light of the new technological changes taking place, my Sociology professor will have to revise his notes are they are now obsolete. There is a new way of achieving status in town and it’s a click away-Facebook. The status that you lack in your dreary life can be achieved in cyberspace and be maintained easily. However that’s the far it goes.

Most girls have realized that no matter how many bleaching concoctions they use, they will always be drab Dorcases or plain Paulines.Thats the sad thing about life, some of us have to be plain in order we can  define who is beautiful, or not. Some of us are born ducks in order for the swans to look beautiful. Gorgeous Grace is defined as being cute depending on how far, beauty- wise, she is from Dorcas and so on. Mother Nature, on the other hand knows how to balance such that what Dorcas lacks in the facial department is compensated through some Halle Berry thunder hips or Tina Turner timeless legs. Or a backside that would make a priest rescind his celibacy vows faster than you can say hell. Incidentally, most of these strong areas happen to be fetishes for millions of men out there.

Having discovered her strong areas, say the killer legs, Pauline takes their photos. The other option is to take a full photo of herself and then crop (that’s to cut for the un- initiated) the photos such that the legs appear prominently. These are later touched with Photoshop or some of those applications so as to remove excess melanin, signs of acne or other undesirable traits. The photos are later uploaded into her Facebook page and her friends tagged along.

What follows is a tsunami of oohs and aahs of admiration from the entire United Republic of Cyberspace. Plain Pauline has now beaten Gorgeous Grace, a model, who usually gets ululations from a few people in a small hall where she serenades herself on the catwalk because here she is getting accolades from all the corners of the wind. Overnight she has become a diva (have you noted how the word is misused nowadays) to be envied by others. She’s now in the same class with Halle Berry and other rulers of tinseltown.And what a way of massaging the ego of a girl who has been treated like an ugly duckling for so long. However, the glory is shortlived.Some other likeminded girl is busy uploading her photos to raise her status and the moment those photos hit her page she becomes the next reigning queen of cyberspace. Thus the entire Facebook becomes a kind of a continuous virtual catwalk where girls strut their stuff from the privacy of their houses.

Also cropping (no pun intended) up is habit of pasting your photos in a famed rich man’s hideout to show the entire world that you have ‘arrived’. Esther lives in a claustrophobic ten by ten feet room in what they call in NGO-speak informal settlements. Her room is so small that the entry of one trench rat makes it overcrowded. Thus she can’t hold those glitzy bashes that her friends from upmarket Nairobi do. To make up for what she’s missing in life Esther organizes a two hour party in one of her friend’s glitzy upmarket address. Every moment is recorded, thanks to her digital camera and uploaded to her Facebook page as the party progresses. The ululations that follow the photos commending her nice house, the cute leather seats and son on can fill a whole tome.

The good thing about Facebook or other social networking sites is the facelessness. The pictures that   you post on your page become an indicator of how well you are doing in life and few will probe to know the truth of the matter. Thus that picture of a wanna -be yuppie leaning on the bonnet of  a sports Mercedes will have ladies falling over themselves to date him where in reality he has never owned a rickety bicycle all his life. He will be treated with reverence among his Facebook friends –the status he lacks in real life. The unholy marriage between consumerism and technology has reduced status achievement to an act that is a click away.

We are living in a very materialistic world where everything is taken at a face value. Where you live is more important than how you live. What you do with your leisure time, rather than working time becomes your identity. What you consume defines you. Welcome to the Age of consumerism. Houses are more important than homes and acquaintances more important than friends. No wonder in these (un)social networking sites one will have a thousand ‘friends ‘  who will send you many happy birthday wishes but won’t  even say hi in the streets.

To give credit where it’s due, social networking sites are meeting some purposes. They have extended the frontiers of human interactions beyond our imaginations. Never before, in the history of mankind, has it ever been so easy and cheap to catch up with friends scattered in the four corners of the world. You also realize that   personal interaction spaces especially in the urban places are getting less and less and these sites have come in to fill the void left by this. Thus we cannot dismiss them as just another case of technology for technologies sake.

But nothing could be more tragic than viewing a human being in small fragmented bits that are altered with modern gizmos to suit accepted tastes. When young girls start viewing their legs as themselves, then problems of identity are bound to arise. When young men start defining themselves by how well padded their virtual cribs are, then society is headed in the wrong direction.  A human being should be viewed in totality, not in small fragmented bits.

I hear they say in the IT world everything is possible. It’s high time some Silicon Valley techie came up with social networking program that captures values and ethics but not fleeting physical attributes only.

Gilbert Mwangi

@ All rights reserved

13^th March 2012