Free At Last

Free At Last


     It was just a matter of when, but I had to pull the plug. I am talking about Orkut which promotes, social networking, a concept which aims at bringing everybody together. People you have met, people you meet, people you hope to meet one day, and people you won’t ever meet. They are all there. For some months, my friends thought it would be great to introduce me to this concept of Social Networking, so they kept on sending me these “Orkut Invites” and finally, one day I gave in and created an account at Orkut. For quite some time my account just existed, with no information about myself except my name and “Afrikaans” being the only language I could speak. And then, I start getting messages to update my profile, and I decided to do it. Just for the heck of it, I decided to try to invite some of my friends; however, it seemed that most of them were already there. Two days of peace and then somehow I get these fifteen friend requests, and when I approved them, having a figure like twenty on my friends list, when one of my friends had more than two hundred people in her list. I know it wasn’t right, but I just imagined of having a figure like that. The worse part however was that I got addicted, I really don’t know, but in hindsight, the only way I can describe something like this is akin to sleeping with a whore, you know you are not doing it right, but then you just feel like enjoying the moment, except in case of Orkut it is probably worse. Everybody seems to be using Orkut as a substitute to e-mail and worse in some cases as a substitute to Instant messengers. If there is something really relevant, if there is really something I want to share with _MY_  _FRIENDS_, friends I really care about, I would prefer to use mail. Scrapbook on Orkut just seems to be a public place to pee, except that everybody can see you pee. And somehow people seem to be interested in seeing other peoples pee. I don’t mind admitting that somehow during my one month of association with Orkut, I myself did fall in this trap. And the only way out was to pull the plug, so today morning after a lot of thought I decided pull the plug. I logged into “Google Account Manager” and decided to delete my Orkut profile and the only way to describe of what I felt after pressing the button was like getting independence. I could finally be connected to internet and not worry even once about somebody scrapping me, and thinking about what I should write in somebody’s scrapbook.


As far as I am concerned, I am free, at last.