The dark side of Facebook.
By Rajiv Theodore
NEW DELHI: It was a near perfect Sunday evening for this Malayalee family. Twenty-seven-year–old Vijitha, her husband Aneesh and their two and a half year-old son paid visit to many temples that day and came home at their residence, F-28, Metro Apartments, South Cheranaloor in Alappuzha, Kerala, to have an early dinner.
Vijitha went to her room to change. She didn’t come out. What usually took just 10 minutes was taking more than 30 minutes, it struck Aneesh after some time. She was still in her room. Locked from inside.
Calling her repeatedly failed to get any response. Aneesh did the next best thing; he forced open the door. The visual chilled him and probably has frozen in his mind, never to thaw for the rest of his life. His wife was hanging from the ceiling fan. Life had ebbed some minutes back. He was too late to save her.
The death of Vijitha and many other shocking incidents reveal the dark underbelly of social network sites like Facebook (FB), the uglier side which is now becoming increasingly visible.
In Vijitha’s case, she just could not face the ignominy of posts on FB by her neighbor, Ratheesh, who happened to be a relative too. It forced her to take this final step, not in a thoughtless rush of shame, but after pursuing several options to stop unsolicited messages. She had filed several complaints to the police station. A petition was also filed in court on the same matter.
The police claim that soon after the complaint from Vijitha, Ratheesh deleted obscene posts from the FB at their behest. But relatives maintain that the cops had slipped in their duty and failed to take any action despite the complaint. Relatives also say that the FB posts on Vijitha were mainly due to a reaction against a long standing family land feud.
In another case from Kerala, a 24-year-old woman lawyer from Kozhikode, Anima Muyarath, was suspended from the Bar Association, after she reacted on FB to unpleasant remarks made by male lawyers.
The comments were a general observation of the attitude of male colleagues towards their women counterparts.
She had this to say on FB: “It has been five month since I started practicing as a lawyer in Kozhikode Bar. I don’t know whether the workplace in all other places in this world is like this or not. I met several silly persons of my age in bar as well as at my office. They address women as ‘sugar candy, dear’ and follow them with comments such as ‘you are so beautiful’ and the like…’’
Anima is now getting support from all over the state for her stand.
This past in November in Bangalore a 14-year-old girl committed suicide after her boyfriend whom she befriended on FB dumped her. In Mumbai, another 14-year old also killed herself after a boy stalked her and posted certain disturbing comments.
There are many other incidents in India and the world over where people get bullied virtually, and the effect is seen in real life. It clearly shows that the virtual world too is the real world, the power of the social media could spill to dangerous proportions.
Although social network sites had of late fundamentally changed the way people socialize, the risks of loss of privacy and effect on personal life has become enormous. Many times users get hooked even on games and applications that these sites offer. Office workers have been seen to slip in their work; students have gone down as far as grades are concerned. And worse still, when the users fail to draw a line between the real and the virtual, the biggest casualty becomes life itself.
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