According to Mozart ‘Love is the soul of the genius’. As Homo sapiens we were conceived from a love conjunction of two individuals that we call ‘birth parents’. We were made in love and live for love. We crave for love and had to share love ourselves. Love keeps the human race orbiting. The genius in us is being called out when we are arrested by the divinity of love.

Since we are birth by love, we daily seek love. Before the age of social media, we seek to satisfy this crave for love by being vocal about it and making our intentions known by different cues in popular culture.  In recent, the advent of technology has made the onerous task seem invincible where you can easily drive love by the number of text characters, type of emoticons and smileys in a person’s status update on a social media tool.

Social media has offered the current generation one of the most unique platform to connect with family and friends seamlessly real-time. Facebook is the colossus giant ruling this space and have at least 2 out of every 7 person connected on the social networking triangle. You can easily share photos, videos, send messages and update personal status. The first thing Facebook ask you is to update your status, it goes like ‘what’s on your mind?’ You know deeply down your answer – you crave for attention and love. In the real sense, Facebook can connect you with people and at most give you ‘likes’ but it is not capable of giving love. You seemly cannot judge the quality of life by the number of Facebook likes.

Recently I have seen ‘A’ students struggling in their studies because most have caught the Facebook bug rather than face their book. One of my niece once bragged about how many ‘likes’ she get on her status update. Nothing wrong or harmful about such braggadocios disposition but everything is wrong if young people equate the quality of their life by  ‘likes’, ‘views’ or ‘comments’ on their timeline. Such people live in their own hall of fame and compare themselves with others with a psych measuring scale. Remember the ugliest of animals, the baboons and gorillas also attract tourists. Anyone can attract any thing and that does not mean they are in any way better than others. In my lexicon, drawing attention is not the same as being attractive.

This is not a de-marketing campaign at Facebook. It is a wonderful social communication tool that allows us to keep in touch with one another and connect based on common interest. It sounds mawkish to hear reported cases of abduction, suicide, violence, cheat, theft, scam and cyber bully attributed to the social platform. Who are these victims? They are friends and family, brothers and sisters, papa and mama who could have been victim of love, looking forward to Facebook for what it cannot offer. Later on, they become susceptible to an illusion and gob smacked by the eventual outcome. Some of us are yet to recover from those sully experiences.

Seeing is believing, seeing is assuming, seeing is reality. So we are made to believe. However not all that glitters is gold. Many young adults and children are often gullible and quick to believe what they see on social media as reality. This is called ‘illusion of the perfect’. First we forget people put their best feet forward. Those photo-shopped pictures that make you think life is crystal awesome as many on your page would like you to assume, thus constituting an abstract article of baked assumption, ill imagination, fantasy scripting and hasty generalization. Pick one!

Facebook is not the problem. We are if we become victim of this nature. You become addicted to an application that at best can give you ‘likes’ but not real love. We forgot our parents never had Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and whatnots. Yet they were able to experience real love and find means to connect without one another without losing reality and missing anything special.

How do you know if you have fallen victim?

• If the more ‘likes’ on your post and chats resonates with your level of self-esteem as a person.
• If you get easily irked or twisted by someone’s comments, either directly related to you or not.
• If you are addicted to the platform and simply can’t go days without it. Some can’t do without browsing for new notifications every couple hours. You are suffering addiction, not far from those suffering from drug addiction. It is just different concept.
• You are always looking unto Facebook for some therapy or relief. Some even look unto the platform for answers to real issues of their life. This is called ‘It’s got to be somewhere or something’ mentality.
• Your excitement level goes up at every poke, ‘likes’, ‘comments’, ‘share’ or ‘message’. If you are promoting a product/services/brand through the platform this is understandable.

Are you a victim?