At the dawn of social media, it still meant something to follow/friend someone, because social media was mostly only who we knew. Then it grew: it came to contain people we got to know IRL, or whose work we were glad to have found. Eventually, it shapeshifted into the beast it is today. Social media no longer signifies anything authentic, even as it has major ripple effects onto the non-virtual actual. The impact of this circus on our wellbeing is certainly real, even if little else is.

            Most of us use social media in a two-pronged way, both being present on it (to whatever degree of activity) while also receiving information from it. The content and the subtext of both parts of this exchange affect our relationships.

            I’ve not been able to sustain my side of some friendships because of the dissonance between who they are and how they portray themselves online, particularly if activism is a part of their career. I’ve been worried about whether someone can be trusted because they’re connected online to someone who shouldn’t be. If I’ve extrapolated because of red herrings, I’ve also been forewarned because of clues.

In our own posts, if we drop the former knowingly, we drop the latter even when we’re careful. Take for instance: someone I met for the first time told me how their algorithm shows them posts related to healing from a certain situation, which I’d already “liked”. That’s how they deduced that I had been going through something.

I’ve also been deeply confused about how social media can be used as a proxy relationship. An old friend, who has chosen to no longer be one, still watches my Instagram Stories – on which I post nothing personal, almost ever. They barely used the app before. They ghosted me, yet haunt my online presence. Who knows what stories they’ve told themselves to justify this strangeness.

Then, there are its uses as personal propaganda, beyond performance. More than once, I’ve been conned by someone playing a long game, who approached me online, all saccharine. In the most painful of those experiences so far, the mask dropped after I began working for them, much later. Needless to say, once I left, they blocked me online from the very things they had me build for them.

I publicly withdrew my work from a project by someone with a proven but little-known record of abusive behaviour. Many – who know this person only or largely through social media – sang their praises, publicly too, soon after.

An event organizer told me rudely on the phone that they were doing me a favour by even hosting me, only to post online minutes later about the paroxysms of joy they were in to have the privilege.

Then there are the numerous garden-variety tactics of climbers of all kinds – transparent at times, and effective enough at others.

All this is about human behaviour, not algorithms, influencers or capitalist underpinnings. By now, we should know social media is smoke and mirrors – but we just don’t look away enough, or look deeper. That too is a human flaw. The conundrum: disappear, or keep being deceived?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express in December 2023. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.