Saturday, August 30, 2014

Trauma of facing Facebook posts

They creep on you most unexpectedly and before you even realise it, the images and stories get lodged in your mind and traumatise you. One such post traumatised me for days together (I don't think I am over it yet) and am now wary as hell to open the facebook page. Why do these people revel in sharing such gory stuff?

I am talking of the news that many people cannot wait to share with others on fb. Stuff that causes me to shudder includes posts of accidents, people getting eaten by sharks, lions and snakes, people whose hands are getting blown off by mobile chargers, people getting beheaded and one that I barely saw but which made me sick to the stomach, about some vague skin disease caused by some shampoo. I don't need to open the video, there is enough evidence already on the page of the gore without any warning, and before I scrolled past it hurriedly, it has already done the damage. I am not joking, the last one makes me not want to open my facebook page in a hurry. It was that sickening.

I normally take out these spreaders of such stuff from my friends list and escort them out of my life. I do wonder what it is that they wish to share with this carefully picked gore. What kind of stuff makes up their mind that they hunt for this information and share it with us as if we were waiting to see this stuff. In a social context certain things are fine being shared openly and some are not. But the present rule seems to be in favor of being as sensational as anything else to draw attention to oneself.

I suppose the one action to take is to gently remove oneself from the presence of those who betray these signs. What's surprising is that the most unlikely people surprise you with their appetite for gore.And I do wonder why facebook does not seem to have any policy for editing out gore and such stuff. If these images could do me this much distress, I wonder what might happen to the younger and the more impressionable.

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