The Big Read: Too much information

Joy usually comes in the morning. But this past Sunday I woke up troubled by a million doubts.

As usual, before I opened the windows and brushed my teeth, I picked up my phone and, after a brief and dispassionate scroll down my social media timelines, I decided to offload some of my worries.

Oft times I will blog. But I wrote a Facebook status update. I wrote and wrote and continued writing about how unfulfilling my life is and how everything feels transitory and unbalanced - turning 30 earlier this month brought with it new anxieties. In hindsight, social media has played a big role in exacerbating these anxieties.

A friend of mine questioned the substantial sharing of some of my distresses and took exception at my decision to eschew the safety of our "inner circle" for the rather public Facebook timeline, where he doubted it would be acknowledged - or garner any useful advice.

My view was, what was the point of building a manageable list of friends if I couldn't ventilate to them? Wasn't this all created so we could feel more connected to each other and eliminate the distance barrier?

After we argued the point, I began to think about how social media was supposed to broaden our horizons, how it was supposed to introduce us to diverse people and opinions and cultures. That's what made Twitter so special - it opened us up to the complex and varied lives that people around the world lead (and made us more compassionate).

Now, it may just be my timelines, but I've wondered lately if social media hasn't seen a lot of us starting to think and behave in exactly the same way. Of course, this is why Twitter, and specifically the "trending" function, was created - to allow a collection of users of the platform to congregate online and pull apart certain topics or live events.

We all want to be in on the action. The upshot is we all take an interest in the same things and want to be seen interacting with the same content, just like the popular users.

We opine on news headlines, about stories we have not read because we want to be the first to react (almost like us breaking the news to our followers), we use the same memes and we fight over the same music or musicians - and lately we have adopted academic jargon that makes us sound like we're all in an anthropology class.

All of this brings me to my real point; how the allure of dating and romance has not been enriched, but impaired by being digitally connected. My Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts are synced, which means I'm always part of the conversation.

The weekend brought with it a potential new romantic interest. My advances were met with encouraging smiles and giggles until I sought a contact number, and was told: "Rather add me on Facebook for now; you'll get my number once I know you better."

And so I co-operated. Until I found said romantic interest on Facebook - and there on the right- hand side of the page, the figure of 23 mutual friends screamed at me. And just like that, the desire to "add friend" dissipated. I walked away. An hour later Tinder "congratulated" me on a new match.

The knowledge that I could dig up all the relevant information (mutual friends, career, employer, hobbies) on any new match by just checking for them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter without their knowledge, was once an exciting prospect. Now all it brings is dread. So much for communications tech eliminating the distance barrier and cultivating stronger relationships.

Now you can find out nearly everything about any person, which kills the excitement of meeting and learning new things about a person.

Quickly, someone can spot that you recently followed a "mutual friend" and give you all the background information you didn't solicit. You will learn that the reason they have been popping up in your list of "people you may know" is because you are already friends with their exes and that they went to school with one of your exes. We want to know everything about everyone, so we are always in the loop - but in the same breath, we don't have time to engage.

Sherry Turkle once said in a Ted Talks: "People want to be with one another, but also elsewhere - connected to all the different places they want to be.But you can end up hiding from one another, even as we're all constantly connected to one another."

Writing this has made me realise that, in the normal world, the most logical thing would be to unplug from all social media. But this is the new normal.