Like any young person in his/her early twenties, I joined facebook and twitter. Peer pressure is what pulled me towards facebook. I must admit I did start spending too much of my free time on it, posting updates, photos (silly ones back then in 2009) and more often than not, it spilt over to my study time. Then came games on facebook like Angry Birds, Crazy Taxi etc., which ate up quite a bit of the free time I had during vacations.
In the end of 2010, the development of photography as my main hobby began, with the posting of a huge bunch of pictures from a trip to Delhi and Agra, in December of that year. The likes received made me want to post more. Thus, after finishing my Masters, five months later, in May 2011, I started posting pictures I took from my DSLR camera. As far as photography sharing on facebook was concerned, I was ok with whatever response I got, after all, it's something I did for myself.
Apart from photos, I would post shared posts, news articles, and sometimes my own opinions, jokes (my horrible sense of humour :P) and sometimes, I would tweet from my twitter account (which was then linked to facebook). My senior during my PhD years, started making judgemental remarks about me being 'online', I would shout back telling that the thing is logged in on my phone, whether I am using it or not. That was the first time I saw red on being on social media. As work got intense, I reduced posting to about one or two posts a day. Plus it started to dawn on me that a lot of people may think I'm an attention seeking monger. A lot of people in my list (my mother and father's friends included) started messaging my sister, and I used to get scathing messages from her now and then, even if I had reduced and controlled my posting. Added to that the amount of negativity and hatred in the posts on my news feed had increased exponentially, which started to make me a negative person as well. Thus, I decided to deactivate my account for a month at a stretch, then go back to it (at least for communication with friends whose numbers I didn't have) for three or four months, and then deactivate it again. During the deactivation periods, I would sit and read, which I enjoyed hell of a lot. But each time I would get back, I would see more of hatred and negativity, of course there would be the odd positive, inspiring posts (a photograph by one of my photography idols or a piece of artwork by two of artists whose works I love to see). But the problem was that this negativity started eating up my time. Same thing on twitter as well (as far as the material I would see is concerned).
What did I do next? Nothing surprising. Before leaving for Poona for my post doctoral studies this January, I deleted my facebook account. Alas, the peace of mind. One big key realization was that facebook and twitter, which are 'social' media, made me unsocial in real life.
