Greetings to everyone, I just spent a couple of days in glorious Germany and now I'm back in sunny Singapore. Ah.. Germany was fun, the beer, steak, potatoes, cars, sausages...
It was all good. More interestingly, meeting my dad's old friends who saw me grow up made the trip was very organic and fufilling.
Well. My Germany trip isn't what I wanted to talk about today. I've been thinking a lot about something lately, more like, we will never get the attention we yearn in social media. Some of you guys would actually scorn and go, Oh, who doesn't know that?
What made me think about this topic was because of this tweet I recently posted.
Yup. It was this bloody tweet that got me all distracted during work and while bathing.
How I got to this photo (It's not mine anyway, but all credits goes to the owner of the picture): I was just scanning through Tumblr and I was like, omg these hamsters are so cute and I actually spazzed for a few seconds and decided to share it on twitter.
And, BAM, there were endless retweets and notifications in my phone and it was the first time in a eons that my phone was that active. I would say that a 1,818 retweets is really a lot to me, especially for a nobody in social media.
To be absolutely frank with you readers, I was excited and to simply put it, I was happy that, hey, I'm finally getting loads of retweets now. It was a small, little breakthrough for me in the social media world. I felt as if I made my mark in this complex social media world, somehow.
(Oh yes, for the record, some of you readers may think that all these retweets are so little and all, but hey, give me a chance alright.)
Slowly, as the days passed by, the number of retweets increased exponentially and I was still receiving notifications like no one's business.
But. I didn't feel as happy and excited as I was supposed to be, just like in the beginning.
I realised that the earlier feelings I had of receiving many notifications were very superficial.
I looked through the people who retweeted it, they were random people on twitter, who just so happened to chance upon this photo and retweeted it without hesitation because of the cute hamsters.
I think the reason why I feel this way is that it wasn't my friends and loved ones who were the ones appearing in my notifications.Well, there were some friends who did but most were just random people. All of a sudden, the number of notifications didn't bother me anymore because people weren't connecting with me on a personal basis.
Usually when I receive a notification on twitter, it's usually someone replying to my tweet, or a friend retweeting my lame/sarcastic/taylor swift quoted tweets. However, this time it was different. There was no connection, I felt a little bit lonely simply because there was no conversation or a relationship between me and the person who retweeted. (I hope you guys can still follow..)
This really got me thinking a lot. Like, is this how getting attention feels like? (Because it wasn't attention I was feeling) Just by having a 1000 plus retweets? Or having 500 unknown followers in your Instagram account?
With a thousand people looking at your tweet but you don't feel a single bit of attention.
How ironic right?
This attention I got from social media wasn't something I was looking for to be honest. The feeling of being 'famous' on social media was very peripheral and I didn't feel like it was real.
It made me realised that the attention I had on social media wasn't something I wanted. I don't know about everyone but I know that I love attention actually. I mean, who doesn't?
This topic got me thinking also, since celebrities have many Instagram likes and countless retweets all day, do they find happiness in all these? If they do, their life must be really sad and lonely I feel.
This got me thinking, do the number of followers on Instagram and Twitter make you feel more included in society? Do the number of likes on that oh-so-pretty candid photo really give you the attention you require?
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After writing all these, I'm not sure whether I'm making any sense but this is just an aftermath of receiving 1800 plus notifications from unknown social media users. I would say that I'm still in the process of analysing all these..
And in the midst of becoming a better person.
