Thursday 13 July 2017

Idiosyncrasies of Social Media

All hail Alphasoars . . .

How has the soaring gone? I hope good.

Social media has gone from communication to confusion. When Daniel in the Bible said, Oh Lord, to us belong confusion of faces" (Daniel 9:8), I think he was actually referring to this age. The time where what we see in the media is either the adulterated or fake of the original.

I joined Facebook in 2012 (guess so). I never thought it was something used not only for information and message sharing but for show of whatever nonsense one have got (food, cloth, property). Is this the real reason why Facebook was created.

As the days go by, we find that social media channels are becoming funnier and dirtier. It has been a means of many social vices which might not be committed in actually sense.

Respect died many years ago since we can always sit at the back of our mobile devices and use our fingers and insult our elders without nothing happening. This in real sense has made the respect known in Africa to just die. Where elders talk in real life and little kids will never show face, on social media it is entirely a different ball game. Youngsters engage in conversations never meant for them. Social media has degraded decent social interactions.


Living above limits has become the latest. He is got no bicycle, He snaps himself, Photoshop himself into a limousine and uploads it on his social media handle and he gets many likes and shares. He is happy. But for many it does not end there. He seeks for attention from some female folks that will fall for his show of idiosyncrasy and get hooked up. He invites her over for a date and the rest is another story.
Introduction to undercover deceit and scamming has escalated due to rise in social media use. We have seen stories that have emerged due to pretense. People pretending to be what or who they are not and they use that means to defraud or get royalties from gullible never-discerning individuals. A friend told me once of one he met on one of the popular social media channels and they got talking. He proposed to the other person to come over to his place and see him.

He waited and the other person start saying stuff like no transport, he should send some monies over. He met me and sought some information and I did some cross examination on the social media handle of the person in question and told him that the person on the other side of the medium is not real but a scammer that uses another person's pictures to defraud other people.

He though he has met a potential 'wife material' while in real sense as I made him to understand, the other person was never a female but a male. I was able to expose some disparity in the updates the individual was making and some later revelations wee got.

I think it is time social media marketers and other individual who profit from activities of social media to raise an awareness campaign to teach, alert and inform end users of these unsolicited activities by fraudsters. It might get to time where we may never know the real person using each handle. Phone verification is doing fine but it is not enough because one person might have up to three phone number with the different telecommunication service providers. Other means of checkmating and verification should be introduced.


Happy Soaring!!!

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