On the Flip side
On the Flip side
I have dabbled previously into this whole universe of sharing my thoughts out loud on a glaring screen, typing at varying speeds with thoughts flowing at rate of knots. Ever since I signed up to a digital platform as a young college kid, not an email service or a chat service, but something popularly known as Facebook or Orkut, the introvert in me panicked and screamed but another voice in me whispered ever so gently to take the step, one at a time. The debut post, those words, made me realize, I am not afraid to express myself, I am wary of my words not being accepted. The subsequent post made me more aware that expression is a form of art not always meant for general public’s flattery.
Fast forward to 2019, here we are, living in a world shaped by social media revolution, the platform which allowed people like me to break out of shell, learn to express, has become antithesis of those very aspects of it’s original purpose. Digitization was suppose to make our lives simple. Transform the complicated, hard to track lives into binary 1’s and 0’s so the common folk never have to deal with tools more complicated than a push button. The proverbial bright light that used to represent something hopeful, is now simplified to something called as “notification”. It may seem overly dramatic to blend the complicated aspects of our lives into simplistic functionalities of a hand held device, but the very light and sound of notification, let’s say, shed a light on me, my thinking and my unproductive flawed routine. I realized, I was trying so hard to keep the light on that device blinking, that the important aspects of my life took a backseat. So I set out on re-balancing my life, not to discount the digital aspect out of it but to take the control back in a way that it works for me rather than me working for it.
Here I am, in front of a screen, the same bright light glaring on my face, but this time it isn’t a notification which drags me into a state of trance of scrolling my finger repeatedly on a glass screen. Instead, it’s a laptop monitor helping me read my thoughts back to me while I type them out loud onto a webpage. I thought long and hard about what I should blog about, rant about minimalism? or preach about how to get your life back on track away from constant barrage of notifications? then I thought, why not take a page from the old book, just express what I feel like, for someone who has varied interests, I like to think so I do, I might as well rant about my feelings on varied subjects that interest me.
After reading countless posts on this medium on varied subjects, I thought I should contribute and polish my writing skills in the process. So after giving up most of social media platforms, deleting most of the apps that are designed to keep you occupied, here I am , On the flip side, trying for once to make a platform work for me, for my interests.
Let’s see how this experiment goes…..
Photo by Reham Azab on Unsplash
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